Bulletin:
PS3 Hacked Through Cryptography Exploit, Claim Group
A group of hackers called “fail0verflow” has claimed to have hacked the PlayStation 3 through a fault in the way Sony’s system creates encryption keys.
Ars Technica reports that at the Chaos Communication Conference 27C3 the group gave a 45-minute presentation of the methods they used to get into the system. Their intention was to restore the Linux-install functionality which Sony removed earlier in the year, but the hack gives full control to the user without having to use a USB device.
The hack was made possible by the PS3 not randomising its key generation, meaning the team could simply work backwards from an existing key and eventually determine the necessary structure.
PSGroove has a three-part video of the full presentation if you’re interested.
via: Joystiq
saw the whole video.
massive, massive fail.
Interesting if you’re into cryptography at all.
What does this mean in a very basic sense, however? Are we talking about a cracked PS3 that can play ripped/copied games, now? To use a metaphor; have pirates invaded Sony waters, or is this simply the ship-building?
What this means is that you can enable homebrew to work on any given PS3. Among them, the HD loader, and the FTP Server. So, put two and two together.
They didn’t mean for piracy to happen, but whatever.
@taiki: Well Sony seems to have fallen on their own swords here. Just watched the conference and from the looks of it, they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It might mean my PS3 will be worth more to me if I can get some cool custom apps for it, or even just an awesome re-skinning or alternative UI. I dislike the XMB.
I hope, for funsies even, that someone thinks up a way to play xbox games on there.
@FLanks: Probably not going to happen. CPU architectures are different enough that this is impossible.
It depends. They could roll out a firmware update that revamps the entire security subsystem. Rebuilds every PSN purchased game with a different key and have it generate that key properly. I’m not familiar with the PS3′s security subsystem to know how robust it would be to fix that flaw. Knowing Sony, I wouldn’t doubt that it’s possible to fix it.
It certainly doesn’t seem like an easy task; at that point though, does Sony just up and apologise and let people use linux again; enable it for PS3 Slims even?
It might be easier than you think.
It seems like it might just be a simple matter of patching the buggy math, rolling out a new key, and putting a firmware update in place.