Reports have surfaced that ‘Geo Hotz’, the man who initially cracked Apple’s iPhone for use on all service carriers and who recently made news for hacking Sony’s PlayStation 3, has opted to release his findings online in order to let the gaming community do their worst to the so far watertight system.
Commenting on his official blog Hotz revealed that “in the interest of openness, I’ve decided to release the exploit. Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released. I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night.”
The hardware and software route reportedly “gives full memory space access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. Enjoy your hypervisor dumps.”
“This is known to work with version 2.4.2 only, but I imagine it works on all current versions.” added Hotz.
The hypervisor Hotz refers to is a low level code that no one outside of Sony and IBM (who developed the PS3’s Cell architecture) should have access to. According to Eurogamer it controls access to the console hardware and controls its operating system, it is also an important component of the PS3’s security interface.
In short, Hotz’s control over the system’s Hypervisor allows him to theoretically cease the security protocol from running – thus giving access to the PS3’s full hardware and software compliment.
Hotz has suggested that this could give the PS3 the ability to run PS2 titles, although if the system itself doesn’t feature the original emulation this seems highly unlikely.
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