According to a report over on Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, a PS3 firmware update launched earlier today seems to have locked out hackers. For the moment, anyway.
The article quotes hacker and PSFreedom dev Youness Alaoui, who explains that the firmware update doesn’t fix the existing vulnerability so much as circumvent it entirely.
Basically, the system security works as a sort of hierarchy – each layer is protected with its own encryption, and successfully negotiating each layer opens up access to the next. This hierarchy was busted open when George “GeoHot” Hotz published the console’s “mtldr” key, which works as a root decryption cipher from which all the others are generated.
Alaoui says that the PS3 simply doesn’t use mtldr anymore.
“For now, it looks to me (at first glance) that the PS3 has been re-secured, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be broken again from scratch,” he says. “The epic fail was epic. It doesn’t mean they can’t come [up] with an epic save.”
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