Now here is a robot that snooping boyfriends or curious ex-wives would like to have – on that can crack a smartphone’s security code in under 24 hours. Of course, when you look at it on the surface, this is no great achievement, cracking a smartphone’s four digit PIN code. All you need is plenty of patience and persistence in trying out all 10,000 combinations or so. Hackers, however, have discovered a way to be more efficient, leaving you with free time to move on with your life while a robot does all the heavy lifting – or should we say, thumb pressing.
The solution is a 3D-printable robot that will be presented at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas early August, where security researchers Justin Engler and Paul Vines wants to show the world what the R2B2 is capable of. No, this is not some forgotten twin of R2D2, but rather, R2B2 stands for Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher, which can be built from ground up for approximately $200 a pop, and it can punch PIN numbers automatically at a rate of around one four-digit guess per second, making it speedy enough to handle a standard issue Android phone’s lock screen in 20 hours or so. Granted, it would look a whole lot more menacing if it was in a shade of stainless steel, no?
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