PS3 Hypervisor Hacked

The seemingly uncrackable has been sliced, diced and dissected.

According to George "Geohot" Hoz, the man responsible for jailbreaking the iPhone, the infamous Playstation 3 Hypervisor is no longer an obstacle. His blog entitled On the PlayStation 3 suggests that his attempts at hacking the PS3 were very fruitful.

Hello hypervisor, I'm geohot
I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

3 years, 2 months, 11 days...thats a pretty secure system

Took 5 weeks, 3 in Boston, 2 here, very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.

Shout out to George Kharrat from iPhoneMod Brasil for giving me this PS3 a year and a half ago to hack. Sorry it took me so long :)

As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG.

It's hard to believe that it's taken over three whole years for someone to crack this pesky security obstacle. What can be believed is that this guy may very well be the first to achieve such a feat. He was able to pioneer the iPhone jailbreaking escapade that many people utilise today, so it appears we're in for a good chance.

This milestone should make it possible for many interesting PS3 projects to start up. This includes homebrew applications, running 'backup' copies of your games, and perhaps some interesting physical modifications. If you have a PS3, this is definitely something you'll want to look out for. :)