UPDATE: HA! So I was *so* close to the real thing! Turns out that instead of 240 Nintendo DS Lites, they used 200 clustered Sony PS III's! I actually guessed that in an email to Sotirov, too! I can't believe you people doubted me!
I initially thought they used the go-kart crashes in Super Mario brothers to emulate MD5 "collisions."
Check out Ryan Naraine's write-up here.
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So Alexander Sotirov and Jacob Applebaum are giving a presentation tomorrow at 25C3 titled "Making the Theoretical Possible."
There's a summary of their presentation abstract posted via the link above, but the juicy parts are redacted, hiding the true nature of the crippling effects of the 'sploit about to be released upon the world:
I have a Beowulf cluster of 240 Nintendo DS Lite's running in my basement and harnessing the capabilities thereof was able to apply my custom-written graphical binary isomorphic differ algorithm using neural networking based self-organizing maps and reverse steganography to deduce the obscured content.
I don't wish to be held liable for releasing the content of this prior to their presentation nor do I wish to be pursued for any fair use violations, so I'm hosting the results off shore.
Please click
here for the non-redacted image hosted via a mirror site that reveals the content of the abstract.
/Hoff