George Hotz - Hacking The PlayStation 3

Hacking The PlayStation 3

Towards the end of 2009, Hotz announced his efforts to hack the Sony PlayStation 3, a console widely regarded as being the only fully locked and secure system of the seventh generation era. Hotz opened a blog to document his progress, and five weeks later, on January 22, 2010, he announced that he had successfully hacked the machine by enabling himself read and write access to the machine's system memory and having hypervisor level access to the machine's processor. Hotz detailed functions that his work could allow, such as homebrew and PlayStation 2 emulation (a feature removed by Sony in newer revisions of the console to tackle production costs). On January 26, 2010, Hotz released the exploit to the public. It was done on the original firmware (OFW) 3.15, then using his codes he made it into a 3.15 CFW, or Custom Firmware. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a Linux kernel module and gaining control of the machine's hypervisor via bus glitching. Hotz wrote that "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". On March 28, 2010, Sony responded by announcing their intention to release a PlayStation 3 firmware update that would remove the OtherOS feature from all models, a feature that was already absent on the newer Slim revisions of the machine. Hotz then announced plans of a custom firmware, similar to the custom firmware for the PlayStation Portable, to enable Linux and OtherOS support, while still retaining the features of newer firmwares.

On April 7, 2010, Hotz posted a video on the internet detailing his claimed progress with custom firmware on the machine, and showing a PlayStation 3 running with the OtherOS feature enabled on firmware 3.21. He named his custom firmware as 3.21OO, and suggested that it may also work on newer Slim models of the console. However, he didn't announce a release date for the custom firmware or mention whether he was working on the same hack for the latest firmware version of 3.41. It was never released. On July 13, 2010, Hotz posted a message on his Twitter account stating that he was giving up trying to crack the PS3 any further. However, on January 2, 2011, he posted the root keys of the PlayStation 3 on his website. These keys were later removed from his website as a result of legal action by Sony (see below). On January 6, 2011, he showed a demo of running homebrew applications on PS3 firmware 3.55 without using any jailbreak USB dongles, based on the discovery of the security exploit by the fail0verflow team. On January 7, 2011, he showed off a demo video running homebrew applications on PlayStation 3 custom firmware 3.55. On January 11, 2011, Sony filed an application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Hotz in the US District Court of Northern California. The timeline of the lawsuit is continued below. On January 14, 2011, Hotz appeared in an interview on G4′s The Loop, where he explained why he jailbroke the Sony PlayStation 3.