Security engineer runs Hashcat on a Game Boy Advance — at thirty million times slower than a modern rig

Security engineer Mark El-Khoury has ported a version of Hashcat, the self-described world's fastest password recovery tool, to the Game Boy Advance — and the results are exactly as absurd as you'd expect. The 21-year-old Nintendo handheld manages a blistering 727 SHA-256 hashes per second on its 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI processor.

El-Khoury built GBA-Hashcat using the Butano engine, which lets developers write GBA software in C++. Unlike the real Hashcat — which supports over 300 hash algorithms and multiple attack modes — this version is limited to a single fixed word list and SHA-256 only. The logic is straightforward: it hashes each word in the list, compares it to a hardcoded target hash, and flags any match. On LinkedIn, El-Khoury cheerfully notes that 350 days of continuous cracking on the GBA equals roughly one second of work on a modern GPU-accelerated rig — about thirty million times slower. He's described the project on GitHub as both "the greatest password cracking of all time" and his "dumbest app of all time."

The GBA launched in 2001 and was never designed with cryptographic workloads in mind — its ARM7TDMI chip was built for 2D sprite games, not brute-forcing hashes. Hashcat itself, by contrast, is a serious professional tool widely used in penetration testing and security research, capable of leveraging modern GPUs to tear through billions of hashes per second. The gap between the two is less a benchmark and more a comedy sketch.

El-Khoury has already followed up with a second joke update, announcing he ported the concept further into the Lua subset used by World of Warcraft addons — so you can now technically crack passwords from inside Azeroth. GBA-Hashcat joins a recent wave of deliberately unhinged handheld projects: one modder squeezed a Game Boy Color into a smartwatch in April, and another built a playable E-Ink Game Boy emulator last month. Apparently the vintage hardware scene is thriving, one terrible idea at a time.