> news sites are overhyping the release/leak/whatever of the rom keyseeds, saying it could be used to fully unlock the ps5. i've already stated on twitter and i'll state it again. rom and seeds alone are NOT enough to pwn a ps5, you either need fuses and nandgroups to complement it
> ... or alternatively, you need to find bugs in the rom that you can use to exploit the ps5. neither of these are easy and require immense work. also, decapping a ps5 apu to retrieve the fuses optically will prove useless to the end user because those fuses are encrypted/xored/obfuscated
> According to The Cybersec Guru, this is an unpatchable problem for Sony, because these keys cannot be changed and are burned directly in the APU.
I'm just speculating at this point, but what could prevent Sony from anticipating this exact situation and burning several keys in the APU? I mean, eFuse is not exactly a new technology. That way, once a key is leaked, Sony could push a firmware update switching the APU to a new key which hasn't been leaked yet.
Yes, but console vendors generally prefer not to allow downgrades.
So if v1 is signed by key A, v2 is signed by key B and invalidates key A; a console that installs v2 wouldn't be able to install v1 after, but that's not a problem for Sony.
But, I'm not sure how many companies would be able to manage their keys properly to ensure that someone with access to key A doesn't have access to key B.
If these are assymetric key pairs and the device side key was extracted from the device... Switching keys wouldn't help, and it's not a huge deal by itself --- having the device side key doesn't allow you to make a firmware image the device would accept.
Fun fact, the Nintendo Switch blows fuses [0] when they do a patch that’s for security/jailbreaking. If I recall there’s something like 12 or 16 fuses they can employ over the life of the product to ensure you can’t rollback updates that prevent piracy. Nvidia builds these fuses into the board.
So if you’ve blown 4 fuses you can’t do a patch that requires only 2 fuses to have blown, it’s a pretty wild solution.
How did the keys get leaked and where are they sourcing this from? Did Sony get compromised, disgruntled employee, what?
If there was a breach, I'd expect keys for the PS4 to be leaked as well which would be quite handy. There are soft jailbreaks you can do currently on the PS4, but they're not full on CFW (custom firmware) and don't persist reboots.
Based on the other comments it looks like it's the decryption keys for the bootrom, which obviously have to be available somehow to every PS5 for it to be able to boot. That means they probably compromised the processor or something, but no need to invoke "Sony get compromised" or "disgruntled employee".
> This isn’t the first time that Sony has had to deal with a security crisis with the popular PlayStation family. The PlayStation 3 was previously hit with a vulnerability when the company made a mistake with their cryptography on the console, allowing users to install homebrew software and allow piracy and cheating on popular titles.
Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive. Imagine what the (console) world would have looked like, if it was still alive. I never got the chance to even try it myself before it was gone, but I'm sure a lot of the homebrew community's energy could have been redirected towards it instead, hitting two flies with one swath.
It only ever was present because Sony wanted to cheat EU import tariffs - by allowing other operating systems, it could be imported under the lower general-purpose computer rate.
IMHO, removal of this feature should have triggered Sony having to pay back the amount of taxes cheated.
If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: https://youtu.be/DUGGJpn2_zY?t=2096
General question: (I don't know enough about cryptography)
Are these symmetric keys or asymmetric ones? Both allow you to decrypt, but only the former would allow you to make changes to it, whereas the latter would still require you to find an exploit in the next stage. I think?
given that there is no dev mode or ssh server running on a console, how do they even read low level binary code such as boot loader? Do they transplant memory chips?
> Now that the ROM keys have been leaked (and assuming they are valid), a hacker could then decrypt and study the official bootloader and potentially use that as a starting point to understand how the PS5’s boot system works.
https://xcancel.com/notnotzecoxao/status/2006525981113332025
> news sites are overhyping the release/leak/whatever of the rom keyseeds, saying it could be used to fully unlock the ps5. i've already stated on twitter and i'll state it again. rom and seeds alone are NOT enough to pwn a ps5, you either need fuses and nandgroups to complement it
> ... or alternatively, you need to find bugs in the rom that you can use to exploit the ps5. neither of these are easy and require immense work. also, decapping a ps5 apu to retrieve the fuses optically will prove useless to the end user because those fuses are encrypted/xored/obfuscated
The article says:
> According to The Cybersec Guru, this is an unpatchable problem for Sony, because these keys cannot be changed and are burned directly in the APU.
I'm just speculating at this point, but what could prevent Sony from anticipating this exact situation and burning several keys in the APU? I mean, eFuse is not exactly a new technology. That way, once a key is leaked, Sony could push a firmware update switching the APU to a new key which hasn't been leaked yet.
Would that not break every other firmware release that relied on that older key?
Yes, but console vendors generally prefer not to allow downgrades.
So if v1 is signed by key A, v2 is signed by key B and invalidates key A; a console that installs v2 wouldn't be able to install v1 after, but that's not a problem for Sony.
But, I'm not sure how many companies would be able to manage their keys properly to ensure that someone with access to key A doesn't have access to key B.
If these are assymetric key pairs and the device side key was extracted from the device... Switching keys wouldn't help, and it's not a huge deal by itself --- having the device side key doesn't allow you to make a firmware image the device would accept.
Fun fact, the Nintendo Switch blows fuses [0] when they do a patch that’s for security/jailbreaking. If I recall there’s something like 12 or 16 fuses they can employ over the life of the product to ensure you can’t rollback updates that prevent piracy. Nvidia builds these fuses into the board.
So if you’ve blown 4 fuses you can’t do a patch that requires only 2 fuses to have blown, it’s a pretty wild solution.
Edit: it’s actually 22 fuses
[0] https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Fuses
I’m not following. Why would it be helpful to check how many fuses had been blown? And how could you have more blown fuses than you’re supposed to?
Firmware v1 requires a switch with zero fuses blown.
Firmware v2 requires a switch with no more than one fuse blown and blows the first fuse.
If you install v2, you can't install v1.
Nintendo can make 22 firmware releases that disallow rollback.
Even if trivial it could be manufacturing savings.
How did the keys get leaked and where are they sourcing this from? Did Sony get compromised, disgruntled employee, what?
If there was a breach, I'd expect keys for the PS4 to be leaked as well which would be quite handy. There are soft jailbreaks you can do currently on the PS4, but they're not full on CFW (custom firmware) and don't persist reboots.
Based on the other comments it looks like it's the decryption keys for the bootrom, which obviously have to be available somehow to every PS5 for it to be able to boot. That means they probably compromised the processor or something, but no need to invoke "Sony get compromised" or "disgruntled employee".
> This isn’t the first time that Sony has had to deal with a security crisis with the popular PlayStation family. The PlayStation 3 was previously hit with a vulnerability when the company made a mistake with their cryptography on the console, allowing users to install homebrew software and allow piracy and cheating on popular titles.
Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive. Imagine what the (console) world would have looked like, if it was still alive. I never got the chance to even try it myself before it was gone, but I'm sure a lot of the homebrew community's energy could have been redirected towards it instead, hitting two flies with one swath.
> Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive.
The causality here is backwards; Sony removed Other OS support precisely because the first jailbreak (a glitching attack) relied on it.
It only ever was present because Sony wanted to cheat EU import tariffs - by allowing other operating systems, it could be imported under the lower general-purpose computer rate.
IMHO, removal of this feature should have triggered Sony having to pay back the amount of taxes cheated.
If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: https://youtu.be/DUGGJpn2_zY?t=2096
This is probably based on the research outlined in this ccc presentation: https://youtu.be/cVJZYT8kYsI
This also goes into a bit more detail regarding how these keys are used.
> https://thecybersecguru.com/news/ps5-rom-keys-leaked/#:~:tex...
Nasty filler to add that to the page.
General question: (I don't know enough about cryptography)
Are these symmetric keys or asymmetric ones? Both allow you to decrypt, but only the former would allow you to make changes to it, whereas the latter would still require you to find an exploit in the next stage. I think?
given that there is no dev mode or ssh server running on a console, how do they even read low level binary code such as boot loader? Do they transplant memory chips?
I guess this is similar to TPM / secure boot on a pc?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445107
As in, you can now craft your own "update" and sign the bootloader/entire package and it will flash?
edit:
> You still won't get a jailbroken PlayStation 5 with this leak, but it will make it easier for hackers to compromise the console's bootloader.
nope?
> Now that the ROM keys have been leaked (and assuming they are valid), a hacker could then decrypt and study the official bootloader and potentially use that as a starting point to understand how the PS5’s boot system works.
This would just allow further study.