A performance study of the ethical hacking capabilities of single board computers

The rate and diversity of cybercrime is growing rapidly. It has become more commonplace, more sophisticated, and more damaging, costing the world’s economy billions of euro in losses every year. To counteract this rising menace, organisations are continuously increasing their investment in information security and cybersecurity, including ethical hacking or penetration testing services. Traditionally, ethical hackers have always used expensive computationally powerful hardware to run special security-oriented Linux distributions. However, the advent of single board computers in the last decade, has offered new possibilities for ethical hacking. This research aims to explore, in a practical manner, the actual feasibility of performing ethical hacking duties in a non-traditional way, i.e., following a novel approach that still uses the same Linux security distributions, but installing them on these low-cost, highly portable small boards instead. The outcome is a comprehensive study that contributes to the body of work in the literature. We conducted extensive performance tests on 4 devices (3 boards and 1 laptop); results are varied and show that the small boards are capable of performing many jobs, albeit with a larger execution time than a laptop, but in general they are limited in terms of running heavy GUIs.