7thsinger
VIP Member
Anyone any news/updates on this?
George Hotz (Geohot), the iPhone hacker recently published the exploit he had been working on for the PS3. It seems like Hotz is done with this work and is letting anyone who dares take on the challenge of continuing where he left off.
Hotz’s claim to hacking the PS3 has caused quite a stir as even the BBC News interviewed him recently. Richard Leadbetter of DigitalFoundry recently put up a rather interesting analysis of Hotz’s exploit onto Eurogamer.
Leadbetter talks about the amount of security implemented on the PS3. He states, “Sony’s console is undisputedly the most secure games machine ever made.” Hotz was able to hack the PS3 on a very low machine level by gaining access into the memory.
Making matters difficult is the fact that Sony and IBM’s security protocols were created to anticipate a worst-case scenario, and assumed that at some point someone like Geohot would gain access in this way. So even more layers of security were added to the design.
It seems like Hotz’s exploit is only the beginning as more layers of security are in place.
Leadbetter states:
While the hack gives access to the entire system memory, the all-important decryption keys are held entirely in the SPU and can’t be read by Hotz’s new Hypervisor calls.
There is also the matter of Hotz obtaining the root keys, which from the comments made on his blog from other hackers indicate that he was not able to obtain. Then there is the matter of gaining access to the Blu-ray drive, which is a monumental effort in itself with several layers of security on it.
Xbox 360 was compromised owing to the unencrypted nature of the firmware on the original DVD drives. Wii was hacked because the system itself was so similar to the GameCube that when the old hardware was cracked, the new revision fell with it. PlayStation 3 is far smarter. Not only is the drive software itself encrypted, but it’s widely believed that the mandatory firmware updates can also reflash the Blu-ray drive too – even if the drive was hacked (it never has been) it would be re-secured next time you updated your PS3.
If the drive did ever get hacked there is also the issue with ROMmark which is a physical level encryption placed on the Blu-ray. This is the reason why hackers uploading dumped PS3 games on bittorrent and sites such as PS3-hacks.com are completely useless. None of these dumps can be played without the encryption keys stored on the ROMmark let alone play them on a Blu-ray drive.
It seems like Sony went to great lengths to make the PS3 hacker proof in the most convoluted way possible. I’m sure given the time and enough manpower the PS3 will eventually get hacked as nothing is ever hack-proof.
In response, Sony released OFW 3.21 which removes the "Install Other OS" feature, which was part of the initial hacking process. To which GeoHot responded:
