PS3 is eventually Hacked

If you had to analyse the Sony Playstations, one thing which has continued to strengthen is Sony’s keenness to prevent piracy. While some would speculate that the initial machine was deliberately easy to hack to ensure a portion of success, that level of gossip could never be leveled at the Playstation 3. The Blu Ray format, the regular firmware updates have all helped to delay hackers in getting to the core of the PS3.

But like they always say these sort of things are inevitable, more a matter of when rather than if. After 3 years, 2 months and 11 days, Geohot who was also the first to hack the iPhone has been able to hack the Playstation 3. He wrote in his blog

“I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

3 years, 2 months, 11 days…thats a pretty secure system

Took 5 weeks, 3 in Boston, 2 here, very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.

Shout out to George Kharrat from iPhoneMod Brasil for giving me this PS3 a year and a half ago to hack. Sorry it took me so long

As far as the exploit goes, I’m not revealing it yet. The theory isn’t really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can’t post dumps. I’m hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone’s KBAG.

A lot more to come…follow @geohot on twitter”

This is an extremely big step forward in hackers understanding of the system, but what will be the implications for gamer. Will it mean the addition of welcome homebrew applications, or could it more worryingly open the door to piracy. This could be a worrying time for Sony, knowing that their machine allows for an upgrade of hard drive which could potentially house digital copies of titles in a similar way that the PSP fell victim to piracy. One thing is certain with hackers keen to push on Sony will feel the need to up its stance towards the PS3 system security.

- Chris Guest

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