Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good 534
ReportedlyWorking writes "It appears that Sony's PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named 'fail0verflow' revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn't take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: 'Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs. Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!'"
Re:Epic Fail? Hardly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
"Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!"
Is it really necessary for everybody to talk like complete dicks nowadays?
To be honest I'm not sure how you can call Sony security a failure. As far as popular consumer devices go, the PS3 lasted for eons. I am both a Sony and Apple fanboy (somewhat), and have to laugh at the hours (literally) it takes any Apple product to be cracked while Sony (as dysfunctional as any company there is) makes a product that lasts for years. Cracking the keys was inevitable, but Sony should be recognized for making it more difficult than anyone else :)
I still sit on the side of the fence where the damn thing should have been open from the get-go...but meh
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dunno, but I can make a comment regarding HDCP.
HDCP isn't really doing the same thing as Sony's code-signing, and it suffers from the DRM problem where Bob and Eve are the same person.
As you say, Sony's use case is just traditional public-key digital signatures, and should be completely immune to attack barring major advances, or compromise of the signing key. So, they are without excuse.
HDCP accomplishes a different mission. HDCP needs to allow any two random and unrelated pieces of AV equipment to talk to each other without anything in-between intercepting the communication. That means that each device must contain a keypair, and not a single key, which means that private keys are inside every HD TV sold today. If you can extract the keypair from any one of those TVs you can fully impersonate that TV which is all you need to crack the system barring key revocation, since HDCP dictates that any device trust any other device with full-quality streams unless it has a revoked key.
If you crack one TV set you break HDCP somewhat. The manufacturer can of course revoke the key and recall all TVs containing that key at considerable expense, and then re-secure the rest of the system (once the revocation fully propagates, which of course involves a lag).
The next problem with HDCP is that all the device keys are related to a master key (which is how devices can figure out if any particular keypair is a good one or not without having any prior relationship). The nature of that relationship allows the master key to be brute-forced once a sufficient number of device keys are obtained. Over time a sufficient number of device keys were obtained, and thus the master key was obtained. That makes revocation of individual devices no longer an option, and the only solution at this point is to invalidate every HDMI-sporting device out there.
The protection on BluRay had similar issues. Again, this is all DRM and it is theoretically insecure since the threat model is an attacker who has physical possession of the keys, which of course there is no mathematical defense against.
None of this applied to the PS3 - at least not regarding code authentication. Code encryption is a different story - if discs are encrypted then if you extract a private key from any valid console you can decrypt every disc out there, but you can't modify and run them without having the signing key or jailbreaking individual devices.
I'm curious as to how they did it as well. If they didn't provide details I'd be suspicious that the key wasn't simply leaked. Key management is the achilles heel of public key crypto.
Re:Epic Fail? WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "epic" part really came about due to the completely inexcusable ECDSA signature screwup. We were left speechless by that one. However, as a whole, the entire PS3 architecture is terrible. Especially after breaking it open and properly analyzing it and finding a ton of screwups (many critical), there is absolutely no doubt in our mind that the sole reason why the PS3 lasted this far is because OtherOS kept all the competent people happy enough not to try to break into the system (that, and maybe hype around their hypervisor and isolated SPE security, both of which turned out to be terribly bad). If you watch the talk you'll actually see that we make this point clear and address the time-to-hack of the PS3. Given our experience and what we've learned from people who work on console hacks, almost nobody tried until OtherOS was removed, so the only valid measurement for "time to hack", as a strength-of-security measure, is the time since OtherOS was removed (9-12 months or so).
OtherOS was Sony's single best security feature.
Re:precisely. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sony cannot permanently regain any existing PS3 with a firmware update (nor can they fix this hole trivially at all, including in new manufactured units). They can make it harder for you to install a hacked firmware on a PS3, but as of today every manufactured PS3 is vulnerable to a modchip (NOR/NAND flasher) forever.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
George Hotz ("geohot") tried his hand at it, given that he had been rather successful at cracking Apple's iStuff. He found an exploit that gave hypervisor access, and in response, Sony removed OtherOS in a firmware update, as geohot's hack required use of OtherOS.
So this can all be traced back to geohot getting involved... though in my opinion, Sony shouldn't have responded by removing OtherOS, causing all the collateral damage. It inevitably was going to result in a lot of really serious people getting involved and, by extension, more stories like this.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, it's perfectly possible to engineer the signature randomization failure deliberately (it would certainly be very easy to botch a signer like this and make it look like a bug, see the Underhanded C Contest for similar examples), but I think it's extremely unlikely that something like this actually happened. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Especially considering the rest of the security is messed up in ways that clearly indicate they just didn't know what they were doing.