PlayStation 3 Hack Released Online

itwbennett writes "On Friday, George Hotz, best known for cracking Apple's iPhone, said he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3 after five weeks of work with 'very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.' Days later, he has now released the exploit, saying in a blog post that he wanted to see what others could do with it. 'Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,' he wrote. 'I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night.'" Reader MBCook points out an article written by Nate Lawson "explaining how the hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."

Does this open the floodgates?

[ACK!!]

If they are able to bypass the hypervisor and then do hack mods for the PS3 this might open up a whole new avenue for modders and interest in the platform that was not there before. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for the PS3 overall.

Re:Does this open the floodgates?

[decipher_saint]

I often wonder if part of the success of the original XBox was it's "hackability".

Anyone care to weigh in?

Re:Does this open the floodgates?

[flabordec]

At least in some places that was the case. People in less developed countries do not have as much money to spend on videogames, some of my friends in Mexico pay about $50 monthly rent, so paying more for a single game than for a whole month of housing does not make much sense. Paying $5 for essentially the same thing, on the other hand, is much more manageable.

Re:This guy is a hack, not a hacker.

[Sir_Lewk]

Trying and failing where none have succeeded before does not a "hack" make.

If indeed he simply duplicated what someone else has done before then that does diminish this acheivement, but I have heard nothing of the sort, you are an AC, and have not provided any citations.

Your ad hominem attack, and your unprovoked lashing out at game piraters makes me think that you have a personal stake in this somehow. Without citations, I'm going to go ahead and say you are full of shit.

No corners cut as far as I can see

[Viol8]

If you have physical access to the circuit board then frankly short of encrypting every single data and address line theres not much any company can do to prevent hack attempts.

Re:Nice step forward, but no full compromise

[rob13572468]

The glitch attack is a pretty powerful attack in that the proof-of-concept he worked out is most of what is needed for a mod chip. Now all that is needed is to find the least expensive microcontroller to deliver the glitch pulse. He uses 40 nS but it may well turn out that even a larger (wider) pulse works which then means a standard 3 dollar 10 Mhz microcontroller can be used to control the glitch. connect the glitch modchip to any line that is controllable under the hypervisor and you have the ability to turn it on and off and you can now build an automated package. The only problem is that you will start by running some software that allows you to place arbitrary code even under the control of the hypervisor... So you install the modchip, load the approved linux distro, run the special exploit program and you now have complete read/write control, which in turn reloads a full uncontrolled linux distro (or any other unsigned code). of course the hypervisor dump may well lead to an implementation flaw that allows access without a modchip being needed which is even better. Its all just cat and mouse from here...

Re:Summary of what I've seen so far

[Sir_Lewk]

Presumably getting the keys and pirating games is not the only thing someone might want to do with a PS3.

Unless the keys are somehow related to allowing linux to use the GPU, which I have not seen indicated anywhere, then anyone bitching about how this hack is worthless because he still can't get the keys seems terribly singleminded.

Re:What could this mean for Blue-Ray

[Rennt]

Much like DVD before it, the law may have been sufficiently designed to prevent distribution of an open source player, but Blu-Ray encryption is not an obstacle to developing one.

Re:What could this mean for Blue-Ray

[Raptor851]

I was going to mod you up (hopefully someone else will!) but figured I'd chime in. Many of us are already playing blu-ray using mplayer for YEARS now...and it's easy to do straight from the disk. Heck...before i got a blu-ray drive for my PC...i was ripping and playing them on the PS3 :)