Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c77Qnk_CMF8
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovy2kPFOu0E
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y23LUiBRcOg
That talk was at the 2010 Chaos Communication Congress which just concluded a few days ago.
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovy2kPFOu0E
Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y23LUiBRcOg
That talk was at the 2010 Chaos Communication Congress which just concluded a few days ago.
The talk covers the motivations of hackers, as well as the vulnerabilities they found.
The new exploit starts toward the bottom, on the slide that just says "ECDSA" in big letters.
Obviously other ways would probably eventually be found but as these guys say, just providing a way for people to run their own code to begin with takes a lot of effort behind people hacking the system. There will always be an army of people out there wanting to pirate games and an army of people wanting to profit off of it but only a tiny amount of them can really do anything about it.
Sometimes absence of evidence really is evidence of absence. Sometimes it's just that nobody was really looking that hard.
Their presentation makes a good case that real hackers really do just want to run their own code and that the 'piracy' bugaboo is something else entirely.
When I was little, I thought Sony was the coolest company ever. They made high-quality reasonably priced HiFi gear. Now my small children have made Sony the laughing stock of the household. Between this Linux debacle and the Windows rootkit, Sony has shown itself to have a habit of shooting its customers in the foot my opinion. No other company has fallen so low in my view.
Seems from watching the videos that they could go a long way on a future console to prevent hacks just by plugging these issues.
Naah. Every major security layer they had in place was broken or ineffective. That's usually a sign of deeper problems in the development process.
IBM probably wrote the hypervisor layer for them. IBM discontinued development on the Cell processor a few years back. It's likely nobody really understands that system at this point better than the hackers.
That, plus the serious problems they had at the launch of the PS3 Fat might indicate that a lot of know-how has leaked out of their organization and moved onto better things.
The PS3 itself is still not a good example of holding up against piracy until the hackers that wanted to run linux worked on it. It was first broken for the reasons of piracy (PSJailbreak) and was not done by the homebrew scene. Actually, all of their work required and is based on already having code running on the PS3 using the pirate method.
So, what exactly is left to support the opinion that the homebrew people are smart, the piracy people are dumb, and if you do not support linux the homebrew people will make it work with the side effect of allowing piracy? In every instance it is piracy that was first. You can also look to the DVD/HDDVD/BluRay scene and see that the piracy people were ahead of the 'make it play on linux' crowd and quite capable.
And don't put words into the mouth of the PSJailbreak authors. The PSJailbreak allows unsigned code to run, that is why they made it first and foremost (they need unsigned code for piracy), they saw that they can get piracy and went for it. Anything to drive the sales, right? And we still don't know who's behind PSJailbreak, and if they are or aren't in the 'homebrew scene'.
What 'pirate method'?
'DVD/HDDVD/BluRay scene' we're comparing consoles to media now? Get your act together.
The pirate method I was referring to is the USB descriptor buffer overrun.
The technological measures protecting HDDVDs and BluRay are as tough as any used by the gaming consoles. Even still, SlySoft in particular manages to deal with new hurdles faster than the rest of doom9.
PS3: OtherOS allowed unsigned code, way before piracy. Wii: Team Twiizers, who are strongly anti-piracy, were the first to run unsigned code. This was later abused for piracy, but only after Nintendo refused to work with them to fix the issue. Xbox 360: Don't know much about this. You might be right here.
Drivechips aren't "hacking" in any way comparable to what fail0verflow, Team Twiizers, or any other group accomplished.
It might be worth waiting until the official recording gets released at http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/ (named "Console Hacking 2010").