As the New Year rang in, Sony found they had little reason to celebrate. A group of PS3 hackers operating under the fail0verflow collective announced they had managed to bust open the PS3’s security routines by some sort of reverse engineering hocus-pocus.
Not long after that, the original PS3 jailbreaker, George “Geohot” Hotz (also renowned for his iPhone OS jailbreaking) released the PS3 security master key into the wilds of the internet. Hotz has repeatedly stated that his intention for doing this was to re-enable the PS3 for running a Linux OS and homebrew software. Of course, many folk may not have such noble motivations.
The implications for the release of the PS3 master security key are simple – anyone with the inclination can now create and execute their own homebrew code, create custom firmware, or (nefariously) run a pirated and cracked game.
Sony issued a short response to the situation, stating that they would address the security issue through network updates. Fail0verflow remains sceptical of the likelihood Sony can do anything about it, stating that the only way to fix this security breach is to issue new hardware.
Hotz has now posted a video showing a PS3 with firmware 3.55 running homebrew software.
Whilst this technical achievement is perhaps worthy of praise, it has dire implications for protecting Sony against software piracy – something they have successfully done for around four years. To illustrate the point, the first claims of successfully running a pirated game on a PS3 have surfaced.
The video below demonstrates Castlevania: Lords of Shadow launching from the PS3’s internal hard drive on a system running firmware 3.42 without the need for a jailbreak dongle.
The hacked boot file was apparently tested on Geohot’s 3.55 custom firmware as well. The hacker patched the game’s executable to trick it into thinking it is a PSN title (and therefore a title that can launch from the internal hard drive).
Sadly, there is now a patched boot file floating around that will allow pirates to boot Castlevania: Lords of Shadow from the PS3 XrossMediaBar on non-jailbroken firmware 3.41 and 3.55. The hacker even goes so far as to claim that it will work on future firmware versions. No, we won’t link you to the information source, or the boot file download.
Discuss the implications for Sony PlayStation 3 piracy on the MyGaming forums.
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