A bunch of hackers dubbed fail0verflow have announced at the ongoing Chaos Communication Conference 27C3 that they’ve worked out the PS3’s “private key” – some sort of routine used by Sony to authorise running code on the console.
According to an over-caffeinated nerd on the PSX-Scene forums, “the PS3 has totally failed in security, by botching the pki implementation it became possible to calculate the keys needed to sign everything, in short PUBLIC PRIVATE KEYS!”
In regular-speak, this apparently means PS3 owners will be able to run unauthorised code on their consoles without the intervention of USB disks.
The group will be posting additional information when their website launches later today, but it seems their priority for the moment is to reinstate Linux functionality on PS3s.
Assuming this actually works, the PS3 could effectively be more easily exploited by pirates than the Xbox 360, which requires additional hardware modding and risks a permanent ban from Xbox LIVE.
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