At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress – an annual hacker’s conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) – a team known only as ‘fail0verflow’ showed a proof of concept that may be extremely damaging to Sony. The team claims to have broken through an important part of the PlayStation 3’s security, that would mean that programs could be run on the PS3 as if they were legitimate games.
The fail0verflow team demonstrated how they were able to find the PS3’s private keys, and referred to the PS3 security as an “epic fail”. According to the group, this will allow not only executables to signed and run on any PS3, but also this can result in a dongle-free “jailbreak” of sorts.
While not making plans to directly enter the “scene”, fail0verflow has stated they will be releasing the tools “in January or so”, so that if the community chooses to develop they can. A synopsis of the logic and the demo can be viewed below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPjd6gHY6A4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
The consequences of such a hack is truly frightening. While it does allow for people to use homebrew games and applications, far more would use the process to illegally pirate games – something that could severely damage the platform, cutting into publisher’s, developer’s and Sony’s profits.
Without the need for a “jailbreak dongle”, and with a minimal chance of damaging the console, piracy on the PS3 could potentially soar, something that effectively killed the PlayStation Portable.
[Source]
