Has the PS3 been cracked?

It looks like the copy protection on the PS3 may have finally been broken, and the claims of the death of physical media because of it have started.

Which are, of course, utter bollocks.

I don’t actually have much experience with the internals of the PS3, but I do have lots of experience with other embedded devices so I’m going to look at this from the areas that I have worked in, which is actually quite similar at a basic level and has included stopping pesky customers getting access to the system, in our case to tamper with data that we’ve recorded that our customers may not want people to see. Consider this speculation based on how I and my colleagues solve the same sort of problems. This will be technical, but nothing too bad if you know some of the basics about how computers work.

The crack appears to be a USB pen drive that you use with the factory diagnostics mode on the console in order to copy games from the disc to the internal disk or external hard drives. You can then reboot the console so that they appear to be mounted as a blu-ray disc and can be played. Games with files > 4gb cannot be copied to an external drive due to the limitations of the file system typically used on USB drives (FAT32).

The reason why this is so major is that it’s a totally tool-free job. You don’t have to crack the box open in order to do it, you just need to plug something in the USB and press both the power and eject button together. There’s no adding a new chip in, no expertise needed at all and at the end your warranty is probably even still intact as far as Sony know.

Let us examine the worse case. The crack is just some software on a generic USB pen drive that anybody can copy there and it becomes freely available on the internet. Every current PS3 can then copy and play games.

So what can Sony do about it? Well the first thing would be to patch the firmware to stop this happening. There’s a good chance they can do this, if only to detect that it’s happened after the reboot. This will start a cycle of cracks and patches that will go on for ever. A better option is to fix the diagnostics mode it seems to be using to not let the crack work in the first place. There’s also a good chance that they can do this as well because they will need that functionality internally to make the consoles in the first place and so the ability to update that code remotely will probably be built in.

At the very worse case there’s nothing that they can do to stop this from working, in which case all new consoles get a new factory mode that doesn’t allow this and the existing ones in the field are allowed to carry on. The popularity of the PS3 is still rising and so there will be a considerable number of non-cracked consoles in the field before long. A thriving 2^nd hand market for PS3s then comes into being for people who wish to steal games.

The last option is to cripple USB on the console, and there are several ways to do this. USB uses four connections to transmit power and data and if you look inside a USB connection you can see them. The two long ones are power, the two short ones are data. Now Sony can’t remove USB completely from the console otherwise all our controllers don’t get charged, but can they remove the ability to transfer data just by disabling these two pins? This would have worked except for a slight problem, the PS3 uses USB for slightly more than just letting you play media from USB pen drives. The PSEye uses USB, as do third party wired controllers. If you kill the PSEye you have killed Move, and I’m pretty sure Sony aren’t willing to kill their new toy before it even releases.

The other option is very dependent on how the crack works. If it is from a perfectly normal off the shelf pen drive with specific data on it then they could disable the ability of the PS3 to load file systems for USB drives. If the crack only happens after the operating system has been loaded then they can just disable the ability to load USB disks as drives and the problem goes away with only a slight loss in functionality for the user. Alternatively this might be covered by what constitutes a BIOS in modern machines, much in the same way you can boot from USB on PCs nowadays because of an inbuilt understanding that lets USB drives be loaded right from the get go and not wait until the OS starts. Again, this should be easy enough to disable by Sony.

It’s possibly that this will bring in the need for registration numbers for console games, but these will actually be made easier by Move because instead of typing a long number with dashes in you could show the insert from the box and the camera would recognise a barcode. If the OS remains secure then games modified to remove this can be detected in the same way something like Steam does and we’re all nice and secure again (except for keygens).

I suspect that the crack will actually be closed with a quick patch and we carry on as if nothing had happened just from the large number of options that Sony have available to them. If you don’t upgrade your firmware then you can carry on, but new games will require an update to run and the damage will be limited considering most sales are from new games. 

Now I’m positive there’s a lot of information that affects this that I just don’t know about so I could be totally wrong, but I suspect I’m not. Basics like how plug and play for USB and SATA drives must be implemented for basic reasons such as you can swap out the hard drive with any other that you can find and you can connect any USB drive you like to the system. The hardware was also capable of running Linux, albeit protected behind a hypervisor that could hide some things, so presented itself as a device that is close enough to everything else in order to work for that.