Obscurity

Sunday August 10, 2008

PS3 remains unhacked or so it may seem

Well I bet the PS3 engineers at Sony are feeling pretty good about their latest achievement. A so far un-hacked PS3 console. It seems the PS3 remains to be chipped or the firmware buggered with. A few like "Dragula96" have managed to edit the V2.20 firmware with some profound results but nothing to call home about. It seems the following reasons dictate the security of the PS3:

*  The firmware is updated automatically from Sony, online, which allows security flaws to be patched. Each firmware release unlocks/creates new features that make the console more exciting to use. So firmware upgrade blocking using your firewall will result in an outdated console and some games might not even run in the future.

* Not much info on how to copy the Bluray Disc games. This is a function of time and persistence.

* So far not a lot has been leaked about the firmware or some debug mode perhaps. Again, this is a function of time and persistence.

The following features will allow the PS3 to be subverted:

* You can run Linux (ppc64) on the PS3

* You can boot off the Linux installation by default

* You have access to the hardware devices on the system through this installation

As an aside to this task of making the PS3 homebrew friendly, it also has some desirables that make it a great tool for hackers. It has the famed IBM Cell Processor with 7 (+1 redundant) cores or "synergistic processing elements"  (SPE). Only 6 SPEs are available to the developer as 1 is reserved for the OS. It has 256Mb of XDR Main Memory and a further 256Mb of GDDR3 memory for the GPU. This equates to one hell of device capable of "password retrieval".

Past PS console hacks have been done in the form of a "mod chip". However it seems that to have access to the hardware by running a Linux installation would imply that one may not even have to modify/subvert any of the hardware. Rather:

* A custom firmware,

* A version of linux that has drivers for all the hardware components (GPU, USB, Wifi, GLan and Bluray) and is wrapped with a windowing manager that is built around a Gtk or Gnome base, and made to look like the existing PS3 operating system.

This would then mean that the base OS of the PS3 is subverted by not being used at all. Firmware upgrades would be moot as now, all the visual / functional changes are customisable by the Linux OS. Backed-up Bluray games will run natively in the Linux OS perhaps or might require a reboot where the game runs in another cut-down Linux kernel that has no GUI loaded etc.

We'll see what the future holds for PS3.