PS3 Hacked?

Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post: "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."

Comments

Cheating

[sopssa]

I guess the main reason for this will be so you can play pirated games. Homebrew is already possible on PS3 and lets not kid ourselves, piracy is always what these things are mostly used for.

But even more worrysome is if this enables complete access to system and memory, cheating will become a problem. For example 360 hack isn't the same, you can't run your own code or modify memory on it - it merely allows you to play pirat^H^H^H^H^H backups. This will be a lot more serious hack.

I usually play on PC, but when I'm playing on PS3/360 I like that I know there aren't cheaters. While packet-modifying is theorically possible if there isn't any encryption or checksums in the network data, cheating on consoles is a lot smaller problem than on PC and some types of cheats (wallhacks etc) are impossible to create without direct access to memory and code.

And I'd like to keep it that way.

Re:Cheating

[Sockatume]

A lot of lessons have been learned from the original Xbox days. By the end, essentially you couldn't get online without the original dash and a retail game, which limited hacks to whatever you could do with game saves or screwing with the downloaded content. Those are relatively easy to police. I imagine Sony will be keen to do something similar, and set up their servers to dropkick anyone who logs in with an unapproved configuration.

Re:Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

No access to the GPU before this!

Re:Cheating

[dasuser]

I guess the main reason for this will be so you can play pirated games. Homebrew is already possible on PS3 and lets not kid ourselves, piracy is always what these things are mostly used for.

You're forgetting one thing - homebrew is possible, but access to the 3d hardware is disabled so that unofficial software can't compete with official games. That, combined with the removal of the ability to even use a 3rd party operating system in the new hardware revisions, is a rather compelling reason to hack the PS3.

Re:Cheating

[Hardhead_7]

Oh, sure, that's probably true. But if it's made difficult enough, and the vendor is vigilant for hacking, it can be made almost impossible. Take the 360, where just a couple months ago a ton of hacked consoles were banned from Xbox Live forever. Most people just don't bother with hacking because they know that one day Microsoft might bring the hammer down on them for online play. And it works. I have several friends who pirate practically all the media they consume, but they have vanilla unmodded Xboxes and buy their games. Why? Because Microsoft's anti-piracy and anti-cheat has been overall successful, and really the only way you can cheat on Live is with a lag switch, and even that is harder now since most games let people boot obvious cheaters. What has been said in jest many many times here, I say with a straight face. I, for one, welcome our new online game overlords. I don't play online PC games anymore because of all the cheating issues. There are sooo many less cheaters on Xbox it's a whole different world.

Re:Cheating

[jbssm]

No it's not. In this case there is a very valid reason to hack the PS3. Linux with full access to the hardware! So far you couldn't use the GPU and you where only using a small part of the CPU processing power. Now imagine having this great multiprocessor architecture completely unlocked for you to program it. These are great news.

Re:Cheating

[Jedi Alec]

Vehicle manufactures should come equipped with GPS based governors, alcohol detection, sex detection

Just for the record, are we talking:
a) I'm detecting you're receiving a blowjob while driving, so I'm just going to pull over for a bit
b) I'm detecting you're a woman, so I'm limiting top speed to 50(kph, not mph) or simply not starting at all

Besides, this is /., neither will happen all that often anyway...

Re:Cheating

[ninjakoala]

Actually there is no longer any way to run homebrew on PS3, unless you manage to run it as BD-Live content from a disc somehow (like BluTV).

With PS3 Slim the ability to run "Other OS" disappeared with Sony citing costs to maintain the feature as the reason to kill it off.

The homebrew option was never really that interesting as (like others have pointed out) there was no direct GPU access and there was no option to VSYNC, which makes for horrible media playback.

While both PS3 and 360 have reasonable video playback features, we all know they come nowhere near the power of XBMC and similar solutions. If you only want one device under your television and would prefer not converting/transcoding everything, this hack might well end up being very useful.

I certainly hope to add XBMC functionality to my PS3, because now that the Slim is out, it's pretty easy to move around the house and hook up to and old device (easier than moving my 360s).

Re:Cheating

[Sockatume]

Jesus Christ, he's not coming out in support of locked-down hardware, he's just pointing out that in principle (as has happened on previous occasions) breaking a console can lead to a wave of shitheads ruining your gaming experience. That's a trade-off that's worth debating.

Re:Cheating

[MidnightBrewer]

Sony is perfectly fine with you running software sold for the PS3; that's how they make their money. Hacking it so that you can give that software away isn't in their best interest, so they build in DRM. The Windows comparison doesn't hold water in this case.

It keeps their developers happy and maintains a semblance of sanity on their system. It's ugly, but seeing that its main purpose is to be a gaming system, it does the job. They don't stop you from remotely streaming or locally playing any kind of media; you're free to knock yourself out. Heck, they even support DivX.

Given a choice, Sony would rather restrict their infinitesimally small Linux base because, quite frankly, nobody really cares. People who are bloody-minded enough to use them as a processing farm are more curiosities than mainstream, and I'm sure that serious efforts, such as by universities and the like, get one-on-one support from Sony if they want it.

Linux users on the PS3: zero profit. PS3 gamers on the PS3: the whole reason the system was made. I think that the line of reasoning is pretty straightforward here.

Re:Cheating

[darkmeridian]

There is a point to limiting certain products so they function as a level playing field. PC gaming is frustrating because of wallhackers and morons with aimbots. Console gaming is preferable because it's generally difficult to hack the system. Limiting products increases the value it has.

Re:Cheating

[PopeRatzo]

To reduce accidents, it would probably be more effective to reduce engine performance to a minimum whenever a male driver under the age of 30 is detected.

The best accident reduction approach would be to temporarily incapacitate anyone who touches a smart phone while driving. And then give them a taser-like shock, knock them out and tattoo "douchebag" on their forehead.

Re:Cheating

[nedlohs]

Yes because zapping the driver into unconsciousness while he is driving at 65mph on the highway will reduce accidents.

Re:Cheating

[RogueyWon]

Why on earth has the parent been modded up? It's one of the most blatantly misinformed rants I've read in a long time.

Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear; for certain genres of games (fpses and RTSes, in particular), I very much like having a dedicated server option. I'm absolutely not arguing against this; I was annoyed by the Modern Warfare 2 fiasco as well.

However the simple fact is that cheating is less prevalent in games which use a centralised server system, or a closed matchmaking system than in games which have a more distributed public model. At the extreme end of the scale, you have MMOs, where the server infrastructure is more or less provided exclusively by the publisher. The server is therefore pretty much locked down. Yes, you occasionally get cheats detected from the client-side (Final Fantasy XI had a bad rash of these for a while), but they tend to get addressed very quickly and the consequences for getting caught cheating are severe (usually the deletion of your account, with the loss of all progress).

At the other extreme you have Counter-Strike, back as it used to be in the wild before Valve finally developed half-way useful anticheat. If you joined a public game, you could almost take it for granted that at least one person on the server would be cheating. I used to be the head-admin of a league, with a few hundred players, and every season, a couple of those players would be caught cheating. It used to be pretty steady... in the 1-2% range. And by and large, the consequences were pretty low. Until fairly late in the day, the worst that would happen if you cheated on a public server would be that the admin would notice and ban you. If you were stupid enough to do it in a league, your team would get kicked out. Moreover, while bans could theoretically be enforced using a unique ID linked to your Half-Life CD key, the system was so badly broken that it was trivial for even your average idiot to get around it. Over time, Valve tightened up on this - and how did they do it? By more centralised anti-cheat, centralised player-registries and so on.

Allowing cheating in multiplayer games is a very, very bad thing for a developer or publisher to be seen to do. It annoys honest players (who are, anecdotally, more liable to have bought the game legitimately rather than be using a pirated version) and makes them less likely to buy your products in future.

Single-player cheat codes are an entirely different kettle of fish. Nobody really cares if you cheat in a single-player game. It doesn't detract from anybody else's experience. So if companies want to include singleplayer cheat codes, then let them. To be honest, the whole "achievements" thing, and the "socialisation" (I know that's an ugly term, but I can't think of a better one) of single-player gaming on the 360 and PS3 has meant that single-player cheat codes have actually become far rarer than they used to be.

There's an entirely separate discussion over whether "premium" content in multiplayer focussed games is starting to intrude on gameplay mechanics, as opposed to being purely cosmetic, but this probably isn't the time or the place for that.

Re:Cheating

[nxtw]

Microsoft has been banning Xbox 360s for years.

The process for "fixing" a banned Xbox 360 console involves cloning the NVRAM from another Xbox 360. That's hardly working around a ban.

I really want XBMC-HD for PS3

[AbRASiON]

This whole DLNA (DNLA?) rubbish is gross, it's so backwards.
I don't want to transcode, I just want a damned good media centre (and a gaming machine!) the XBMC devs had started considering work on the PS3 a long time ago but then Sony closed the loophole to access the video card under linux (or rather accelerated mode?) so it was scrapped.

The PS3 is a fantastic chunk of hardware and while I'd really rather not get banned from their system as I have no intention (or time anymore) to pirate games, I'd love to see the machine play back stuff a bit better. (it does fairly well now but it's nothing on XBMC)
The machine has 256mb of system ram, does 1080p output, optical output, 7.1 dolby hardware, wifi, hard disk, USB 2.0, gigabit networking - it's more than enough to do HD XBMC.
Fingers crossed in 12 to 18 months time there's some kind of news.

Errr - NO! Hom,ebrew not already possible.

[Nursie]

You can't access some of the hardware, particularly the GFX from an "Other OS" and the new slim models don't even support the Other OS option, so no, this is not just for cheating and piracy and there is no current way to run homebrew well.

We can even run linux better in a hacked system as currently the graphics performance is pretty dreadful. There is far more to life than piracy and cheating. I welcome this development.

Helll, I'd welcome it even if there were few to no forseeable applications, just the opening up of a new computer platform...

RSX in Linux?

[Arakageeta]

Linux on PS3 for non-scientific work has been a disappointing experience. There is very little code out there that uses the SPUs (and the PPU stinks for general purpose computing) and the hypervisor prevents hardware accelerated graphics.

While the first issue has to do with the community, the second is a restriction imposed by Sony. Perhaps this hack will make it possible to use the RSX (PS3's hardware graphics) in Linux? Maybe then an SNES emulator will run better on a PS3 than a second-gen iMac.

What is the Linux community's willingness to embrace a hack such as this?

Hack leaked, reprinted here

[noidentity]

The hack apparently involves pressing up, down, left, right, X, and O in pairs.

Blame Sony, not the hacker

[Opportunist]

Before anyone goes "oh, this is only so people can play copies and cheat".

Read the other comments. See what people would like out of their PS3. They want to do "real" homebrew software, with full hardware access instead of the castrated version Sony "allows". They want to use their PS3 as a Media Center, something that's simply impossible with the current setup.

Give the people what they want and they will not crack your hardware open. Sure, some will do it for the "going to the moon" reason (it's there, and we can), but most will want their box to do what they want to do. If the box does it, no hacking will happen.

I modded my old XBox. Why? Because I wanted to run XBMC. It wanted a way to stream my movies on my HD to my TV easily. The XBox was there, a TV card for my computer wasn't (the SVideo output was really crappy), so it was a no brainer that I'd want my XBox which had logically a good TV compatible output to do the trick. It didn't do it out of the box, so it was modded. Oddly, I never bought a single game ever since, wonder why that could be...

Bottom line, when people "hack" a platform, they will of course strip all copy restriction as well, simply because it limits the ability of the box and it's possible. If you want to keep your users from hacking their box, give the box any ability your users might want to get out of it.

No Cedega for you!

[Nursie]

Sorry, but Wine and its derivatives can only ever work on x86 hardware (or hardware with x86 compatibility) as I understand it. You can move binaries between OS's by emulating.intercepting.translating system calls, but not between architectures.

It would need native linux games to be compiled for PPC, preferably designed and built specially for Cell hardware.

Re:You have it completely right

[Narishma]

Sony doesn't really care about all of that. They only care if you buy PS3 games as everything else will lose them money. If you buy a PS3 and use it as a computer or HTPC or whatever, they lose money on it. Only by selling games for it do they actually make money.

Re:You obviously know nothing

[plague3106]

Sounds like you bought the wrong device. What you want is called a computer, and will allow you to run any code you want.

Re:You obviously know nothing

[Shimdaddy]

The difference between a computer and a ps3 is that the ps3 sells for less than it costs to make. Sony makes this money back through selling games -- claiming that there is no difference between a game console and a computer since they have equivalent parts is disingenuous. You can't have it both ways -- you either get great hardware for cheap with restrictions on it, or great hardware for a more reasonable cost and the freedom to do whatever you want with it.