Sony's never ending war with hackers is well documented, to say the last. Though any user who has to endure the constant firmware updates knows the story already, even if not a single new post or blog about the matter has ever been read.
Many believe that piracy is what truly held the PSP back, while others might argue that its what helped to sell so many systems in the first place. Whereas the PS3 has been very difficult to exploit. Until now.
Hackers were going at a decent pace, up until version 3.55 of the firmware. Then along came 3.60 last year and it appeared that there was no real work around to some of the security holes that had been plugged.
The one big challenge has been creating a hacked version of the firmware that allows one to access the PlayStation Network. But along came a trio of hackers, calling themselves "The Three Tuskateers", who discovered a work around at last in the form of the LV0 decryption key.
It's fairly devastating for Sony. As Eurogamer explains:
While Sony will almost certainly change the PSN passphrase once again in the upcoming 4.30 update, the reveal of the LV0 key basically means that any system update released by Sony going forward can be decrypted with little or no effort whatsoever. Options Sony has in battling this leak are limited – every PS3 out there needs to be able to decrypt any firmware download package in order for the console to be updated (a 2006 launch PS3 can still update directly to the latest software). The release of the LV0 key allows for that to be achieved on PC, with the CoreOS and XMB files then re-encrypted using the existing 3.55 keys in order to be run on hacked consoles.
The funny thing, if you can call it that, is how the aforementioned hackers discovered the LV0 key a while back, but did nothing with them. But then info was then leaked (and not hacked, which would have been all too poetic), by hackers who intended on turning a profit with such valuable info. So the Tuskateers decided to let the key loose into the wild.
As one of Sony's latest nightmare states:
You can be sure that if it wouldn't have been for this leak, this key would never have seen the light of day, only the fear of our work being used by others to make money out of it has forced us to release this now.
