Here's your silver platter

In the interest of openness, I've decided to release the exploit. Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released. I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night.

Please document your findings on the psDevWiki. They have been a great resource so far, and with the power this exploit gives, opens tons of new stuff to document. I'd like to see the missing HV calls filled in, nice memory maps, the boot chain better documented, and progress on a 3D GPU driver. And of course, the search for a software exploit.

This is the coveted PS3 exploit, gives full memory space access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. Enjoy your hypervisor dumps. This is known to work with version 2.4.2 only, but I imagine it works on all current versions. Maybe later I'll write up how it works

I've gotten confirmation the exploit works on 3.10. Also I've heard about compile issues on Fedora. I did this in Ubuntu. I would really like someone to write up a nice tutorial :)

This is a good article for what it means for the less technical. A good more technical writeup is here.

Good luck!

A Level Playing Field

Right now, I'm playing with the isolated SPEs, trying to get metldr to load from OtherOS. Interesting thing, I am not using the exploit. I always assumed the enable isolation mode register was hypervisor privileged. It's not, it's kernel privileged, which means using hypervisor calls you can all get to it. So, get to hacking. Here is the code I am playing with.

I'm not that opposed to releasing the exploit, but I think the majority of you are going to be disappointed, even if you do get it working. Unless you have pushed the HV to it's limits, this exploit really isn't going to do much for you...yet. So install OtherOS and start playing around. If people start coming up with convincing reasons why they need the exploit to go further, I'll release it. It's just a waste to release if people can't make use of it.

As far as the GPU goes, I have full access to the GPU memory space 0x2800... But without a driver, it's useless. 3D video card drivers are notoriously hard to write, look at the ATI and NVIDIA ones for linux. The best are still the closed source manufacturer ones. I'm not even sure I believe that the HV restricts video card access, just that the OtherOS driver is 2D. If someone skilled in video card driver development comes forward, and they can explain in detail what the HV is restricting, I'll send them the exploit.

And something has to be done about the comments. Theres a couple of good ones, mixed in with tons of trash. Please, if you don't have something technical and useful to say, don't say it. This is not the place for congratulations(go back to the hello hypervisor post), debates about piracy(go somewhere else, the internet is big), or trying to convince me to do X.

What it is and what it isn't

First off, this is not a release blog like "On The iPhone". If you are expecting some tool to be released from this blog like blackra1n, stop reading now. If you have a slim and are complaining this hack won't work for you, stop reading now. WE DO NOT CONDONE PIRACY, NOR WILL WE EVER. If you are looking for piracy, stop reading now. If you want to see the direction in which I will take this blog, read the early entries in the iPhone one. Information on this blog is for research purposes only.

That aside, I'll tell you what I have so far. I have added two hypercalls, lv1_peek and lv1_poke. peek reads memory in real space(including all the MMIO), poke writes it. I can also add other arbitrary hypercalls as I see fit.

The hypervisor is complicated, it is written in C++ and is PPC, which I am not that familiar with yet. At first I was trying to add a hypercall to add arbitrary real memory to the LPAR, but it kept crashing(because I can't code), which is really annoying, because I have to wait while Linux reboots.

Some people pointed out that I have not accessed the isolated SPEs. This is true. Although as far as doing anything with the system, it doesn't matter. The PPE can't read the isolated data, but it can kick the isolated SPEs out. Decrypt the PPE binary you need using the intact SPE and save the decrypted version. Kick out the SPE, and patch the decrypted version all you want. And interesting note, by the time you get to OtherOS, all 7 working SPEs are stopped.

Despite this, I am working on the isolated SPEs now(which I can now load), because what I'd really like to do is post decryption keys here so you guys can join the fun.

I know some function names...

And now if calls have restrictions I don't like, I zap them.

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.

A lot more to come...follow @geohot on twitter

No ECC

Just cause I can't read the ram bus doesn't mean I can't mess with it.

I don't think...

...glitching the memory bus like a savage with a screwdriver is going to work.

Tomorrow, I'll try a real attack.