Build your own $85 brute force PDF password cracker

Here's an interesting weekend project - Nuno Alves has built himself his own $85 PDF password cracker using the BeagleBone, tapping into the power of it's 700 MHz ARM processor to do the cracking. 

A password protected PDF file is passed to the device via a USB drive and a click of the button starts the process. Currently the code uses a straight up brute force attack which can test just over 6000 four-character passwords per second. Certainly not what you'd call blisteringly fast and basically once you move to passwords with 5 characters or more, this is not going to be a feasible route. Nuno mentions the possibility of running several ARM processors in parallel or using a dictionary to speed things up further - don't think of this as a replacement for your GPU cracking box, rather more as an interesting and fun project for those looking to get into hardware hacking and programming.