The "Janus Project"

The "Janus Project" is the brainchild of Kyle Williams of the Janus Wireless Security Research Group in Portland, Oregon.

Mounted inside an epoxy and silicone-sealed watertight case lives a 1.5GHz C7 powered EPIA EN 15000G motherboard, 2 x four-port PCI to mini-PCI adapters, 8 x 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI WLAN Modules, 2 x 1W 2.4Ghz WLAN amplifiers, a keyboard and a 17in LCD screen. The system can scan up to 300 wireless networks simultaneously, storing and AES encrypting in real time all the data onto its 20GB hard drive.

By focusing all 8 WLAN cards onto an access point and using a combination of common Linux tools, the Janus Project can crack a WEP key in under 5 minutes. WPA and WPA2 encryption aren't far behind - Kyle and his friend Martin Peck are optimising the software to use the Padlock hardware acceleration of the C7 chip to crack those too.

If Kyle gets captured in enemy territory and tortured, an "Instant Off" switch will render the captured data useless until a password is entered and a USB stick containing a 2000-bit passkey is inserted. Presumably during the torturing process.