PS3 Hack: Can this Spell Doom for Sony?
The console which was thought to be indissoluble has revealed its Achilles heel. With the release of the Metldr key, the PS3’s security is in tatters. Sony has only to pint their fingers at themselves, as they failed to encrypt the PS3’s root key which is an elementary and mandatory procedure for any hardware manufacturer. The notion of Sony overlooking such a critical flaw leaves us as well as the hackers baffled.
Jailbreak, the previous attempt at hacking the PS3 succeeded but only to a certain extent. When it hit the market, game backups spread like wildfire, but Sony was quick to counter it with the 3.41 firmware which disabled Jailbreak’s ability to bypass the encryption. A patch was released which allowed you downgrade the firmware but the 3.55 firmware made all such attempts futile and permanently disabled the ability to downgrade your firmware.
But, just when Sony could breath in relief and thought that they had done the required damage control, little did they know that something much worse was awaiting them in the new year which would shake the very foundation of the console, providing them with a challenge which they would have never wanted to face this console generation.
By discovering the private and root keys, the failOverflow team has rendered the on-die console security irrelevant and the Hypervisor tech (the CPU guardian that is supposed to block access to unauthorized code) was made almost completely pointless. One can now decrypt firmware and sign their own firmware and executables, bypassing the memory encryption and anti-downgrade protection without the slightest need for a hardware hack.
In short, hackers now have every bit as access to the PS3’s internal processes as Sony does themselves.
failOverflow has released all their tools which they used to hack the PS3 for thousands of hackers to play with. As mentioned above, the tools released lets one sign in their own homebrew and executables. Although, there are no such homebrew available as of now, it’s only a matter of time and rumours are already flying that a few have already been developed, including one known as PS3 Unlocker which we reported here and made a feature of its own here.
There is no denying that piracy is inevitably going to give a large boost to hardware sales. Both the PS One and PS2’s were hacked early in their life cycles and that resulted in a significant push for their hardware sales. Hacking the two consoles was mere child’s play and hackers even managed to surpass the regional protection with the now infamous “disc swapping†method.
The widespread hacking increased the sales of the two consoles by nearly tenfold in countries outside NA and Europe, mostly aided by to fact that about 90% of the last gen consoles have never been connected online.
So what does this prove for Sony? The PS3 hasn’t been profitable for Sony till late 2009. Each PS3 unit cost Sony a loss of around 250$-300$ at launch. Sony’s intention was to make up the money with software sales. Despite the move to the 45nm fabrication process, Sony makes a profit of roughly 20-40$ per unit. Even if the PS3 sales does manage to exceed 200 million, it wouldn’t make up for the billions lost by Sony due to initial losses and this new threat piracy.
Page 2: A closer look at this mess
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