Turbulence was to be expected from the 27th Chaos Communication Conference being held in Berlin, and a team of computer programmers (the same guys responsible for unlocking the Wii) has revealed the final piece to cracking the PS3 security puzzle that has withstood the concerted onslaught of thousands of hacker/gamers for over four years.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]The team, presumably named fail0verflow, has created a hack that doesn’t require a dongle, and works with a range of firmware versions that range from as recent as the current v3.55, to v3.42 and earlier. Instead of trying to win the impossible war of security bypasses, fail0verflow has pierced straight to the heart of the problem, and has extracted the non-random private cryptography key of the device, enabling users to write self-signed homebrew software. The PS3 system was also jailbroken, with the team managing to overwrite the bootup NOR flash, providing complete control.
The consensus of the active PS3 hacking community out there is that the PS3 is now effectively and irreparably jailbroken, which most unfortunately for Sony, doesn’t just benefit developers, but pirates as well. Reports of the conference say the team commented it would be very difficult for Sony to fix the described exploits, and that Sony’s security was an “EPIC FAIL!” Epic, after such a long war, sure, but fail?
The tools required for the fail0ver jailbreak will supposedly be released by the team at some point next month, over at their currently 404 site. Check out the below videos showing off the process behind the hacks: