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Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this could be used to decrypt/unpack/dump/whatever the contents of games?

I know the Dark Souls community are gasping to see the cut content which may or may not live inside the Bloodborne game files.

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Why would that be any easier than just ripping the content off the disc directly?

Pretty sure the game files are encrypted and all the consoles have a secure chip which decrypts them. Getting files from the game disc is easy, reading them isn't.

> all the consoles have a secure chip which decrypts them.

I assume Steam Machines shouldn't do that and therefore they should be more mod friendly.

That has to be true for Steam Machines since you can build your own.

Especially considering they run Linux, so... I'm decently sure that Steam could easily use some form of binary protection.

True for Steam Machines, but it wouldn't help in this specific case, as Bloodborne is a PS4 exclusive.

Yea. I think that's called the NOR chip.

As iLoch said, the disks are encrypted.

Just because the PS4 can run Linux doesn't mean you get free access to data on arbitrary discs. If this is anything like the PS2 and PS3 incarnations you're locked out from a lot of that.

This isn't an officially sanctioned sandboxed Linux mode like on PS2-3. It's an exploit for (an old version of) the customized FreeBSD kernel that all games on the PS4 run under; in this case the exploit is used to throw away the kernel in memory and chainload Linux, but it could also be used to just install some kind of hook that dumps decrypted game data.

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