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Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good
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!'"
"Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!"
Is it really necessary for everybody to talk like complete dicks nowadays?
Epic Fail? WTF?
How many years has it taken to crack the PS3?
I'd say that Sony has done a remarkable job.
Does it go on forever?
It's a bit late to invalidate private keys.
My understanding is that every PS3 game is signed with those keys. Therefore, invalidating them through a firmware update would mean that every PS3 game to date will no longer work.
While I wouldn't put it past Sony to try this, this would result in not only massive lawsuits, but also would be a massive PR blunder.
Having said that, there could in theory be some sort of additional key telling what date a disc was signed, but even if that were true, it would be trivial to work around.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
From the blurb:
'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.
Ok, the PS3 was launched on November 11, 2006. Today's date is December 29, 2010. That means that it took over four years to be broken.
Compared to DVD and Blu-Ray, that is actually pretty darn good.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It is impressive indeed. Though I do note that it didn't completly resist attack for four years. It just took for years to be completly, irrepairably and conveniently broken. There have been wayst o break the PS3s DRM for years, but their complexity put the beyond the ability of all but the most technologically capable users. With the code-signing cracked, it's as simple as burning an ISO.
How did Sony fuck that one up?
It was my(admittedly layman's) understanding that a public/private key crypto implementation, assuming it isn't deeply flawed, using key lengths suited to the computational capacities of PDP-8s, or otherwise totally fucked, was mathematically secure against anything other than a profound breakthrough in prime factorization algorithms, an unbelievable advance in computational power, or an insider leaking your private key.
With stuffy like HDCP, it was understood that serious tradeoffs were made in order to make the crypto cheap and fast enough that any POS $200 monitor should be able to decode an encrypted bitstream fast enough to handle the demands of uncompressed digital monitor connections. The weaknesses just came with the territory.
With something like the PS3, though, they have serious computing power available, and were dealing with a straightforward case of "verify that the code signed with private key X has indeed been thus signed, and not modified since, using public key Y, from which private key X is essentially not computable". Virtually every real-world use of cryptography depends on the ability to do that without disclosing your private key(save by malicious insider/hacker attack).
What did Sony do wrong? Obviously, they could do nothing about a suitably well-equipped hacker physically modifying a PS3 to stop it from verifying at all, or to always return "yup, all good" regardless of the verification outcome; similarly, a firmware bug could allow the same outcome without the expense of physical modification; but how could it be that they would have to put anything in their client(no matter how well hidden by hardware obfuscation/TPMs/smarcards/whatever) that could be used to compute their private key? Isn't a public key, which is a totally safe piece of data to disclose, all you need to verify whether or not something has been signed with the matching private key?
I admit that I don't have a deep understanding of this stuff; but it seems like this is the equivalent of "Hey, possession of the list of trusted CAs and their public keys has allowed a hacker with a copy of firefox to compute Verisign's root signing keys!".
How did Sony fuck up such that this story is not the biggest breakthrough in cryptoanalysis since frequency analysis?
Ok, the PS3 was launched on November 11, 2006. Today's date is December 29, 2010. That means that it took over four years to be broken.
Compared to DVD and Blu-Ray, that is actually pretty darn good.
I was at the presentation in Berlin today. They did bring up this exact point.
Their counter argument was that people don't take into consideration that the console did support homebrew until Sony declared they'd drop that. The argument for that action was they'd save money not having to support it for their then-new PS3 Slim models, which turned out to be bullshit after hackers discovered that the Slim (with some hacking) could actually run the same Linux distros as the PS3 Fat. They then disabled OtherOS on the PS3 Fat, too.
This was 12 months ago (can't cite a source other than the slides), making it take only 12 months of actual effort for it to get cracked, as opposed to other (closed) platforms where the homebrew hacking efforts begin at day 0.
That's true. And Sony have been boasting of having the toughest DRM of all consoles.
However, it only took half a year from removing Linux support, and in that short period have had many partially successful attacks against it. Before, while they had the Linux support, such stories were remarkably rarer.
Many critics meant that the continued security of the console was partially because they allowed linux to run on it, and so many of the talented people had no reason to look closer at it. Since PS3, after four year of "DRM cracking almost never heard of" have now gone to "Completely broken" in just over half a year's time, I think they have a point there.
It's not that it was that much more secure, it's just that most of the really talented people had no reason to look into it.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Folks toss about the phrase "Epic Fail" far too loosely. Here's what a real Epic Fail looks like:
The DRM code has a bug that, when a certain condition happens (time passes, specially-formulated packet received, etc.), it overclocks the CPU to the point that it catches on fire. Within minutes of the event, most of the millions of PS3s in the wild have set peoples' homes ablaze.
As a result, thousands die and the insurance industry collapses. Anarchy reigns, so there's nobody to enforce copyright anymore and the original DRM is rendered irrelevant.
THAT is an epic fail.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
From @fail0verflow:
"we only started looking at the ps3 after otheros was killed."
and
"our goal is to have linux running on all existing PS3 consoles, whatever their firmware versions."
If Sony would have left OtherOS alone, they wouldn't be in this predicament.
Unless they can get every publisher to send the hashes for every version of every game they have sent to the CD press, some people will find their games broken
But Sony already possesses them - they had to sign them in the first place! Either that or they entrusted all those publishers with with their private signing key. Which would be a terrible idea.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The PS3 was being attacked well before OtherOS removal. When linux was available the graphics on the machine were limited to virtualization. The race was on too crack the 7 locked down SPUs. Were people successful? Mostly no, but that doesnt mean attempts havent been made. If i remember correctly, Geohot's intention was to gain access to the cores. They just happened to find an exploit to give them keys to the kingdom
Removing linux definitely brought the talent out of the woodwork, but it did not start a war
> Do they really have Sony's signing key?
Yes, we have most of their signing private keys.
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.