News broke over the past weekend that a bunch of hackers under the fail0verflow collective had bust open the PS3’s security routines, using Sony’s own authorisation keys. Now it turns out George “Geohot” Hotz – who originally hacked the PS3 sometime last year– has become involved, and has since acquired and published the PS3’s “master key” online.
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry tech wizards have posted a technical exposition of the hack, but this bit sums up the most relevant information for people who can’t do math (like me):
“Every PS3 executable file is encrypted, or signed, using private ciphers only available (in theory) to Sony itself. Fail0verflow are now in possession of all of the encryption keys Sony uses.”
This basically means that anybody who knows what they’re doing could write their own DLC packages, custom firmware, or other applications for the PS3.
Sony could, of course, change those compromised encryption keys – but according to the hackers, that would instantly invalidate every game released on the platform since launch.
The PS3 has held out against hackers for some four years or so now – that’s pretty respectable for this generation (or any other, really), considering the Xbox 360 was hacked in just one year, and the Wii in a rather sorry one month.
Ironically enough, fail0verflow’s stated incentive to hack the console was simply to reinstate support for Linux (OtherOS) – support which Sony yanked due in part to Geohot’s previous hack attempt. Revenge of the nerds, indeed.
This altruism notwithstanding, the reality is that piracy is now likely to become a significant problem for the PS3.
Hacking the Xbox 360 involves hardware modification and risks a permanent ban from Xbox LIVE – a major deterrent for many owners; fail0verflow’s solution is unintrusive, apparently impossible to circumvent, and works on all PS3 models.
As Digital Foundry explains, “Modules within the firmware can be patched, re-signed and repacked into an update file that any PS3 – jailbroken or not – can read. The patches made by the PSJailbreak USB dongles could be hard-coded into custom firmware, meaning dongle-less piracy that encompasses current and future firmwares.”
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), Sony has yet to make any official statement about this.
Discuss the latest PS3 hack on the MyGaming forum.
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