27c3: Console Hacking 2010 (en)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as the primary source on Sony's ECDSA nonce-reuse blunder and the history of console cracking.
What it is
The fail0verflow team (bushing, marcan, sven) present console hacking at 27C3, covering Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 exploits. They explain how the PS3 was cracked after Sony removed Other OS.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends DCKing · 2019-12 · on “The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers”
This doesn't take anything away from Sony's decision making, but removing OtherOS never really helped them "get good security". The PlayStation 3 was cracked wide open [1] without OtherOS and because people were pissed at its removal. On Playstation 3s released in the first 3.5 years of its lifespan you can get full hypervisor compromise without any hardware mods, and you can yet again run OtherOS on the latest firmware. Now with less restrictions than before. Newer PS3s (starting with CECH-25xx) have 'only' been partially compromised. They can't run OtherOS, but they can still run homebrew and piracy despite Sony taking OtherOS away. Maybe it's a bit of solace that this stuff only punished
Recommends xav_authentique · 2026-01 · on “Sony PS5 ROM keys leaked – jailbreaking could be made easier with BootROM codes”
If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: [this video]
Cites tgma · 2025-05 · on “There Is No Diffie-Hellman but Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman”
I believe the patent issue was by far the dominant friction for adoption in 2000s. On the NIST curve problem, well, maybe FUD, but evidently, they indeed backdoored the elliptic curve-based random number generator, so I would say some distrust is warranted. Irrespective of the curve issue, ed25519/x25519 is superior and has other nice properties like not catastrophically breaking if you can't generate a unique random "k" for ECDSA as PlayStation discovered the hard way[1]. [1]: [this video]
Cites CursedSilicon · 2026-01 · on “Open-source self-driving for 325 car models from 27 brands”
I'm a frankly rather disgusted at the comparison (or suggestion of) using an LLM to correct the record. So instead I used the 20 watt "LLM" behind my eyeballs running on snacks to reaffirm my memory as someone who was there. Going through old news articles and WayBackMachine where needed. Sadly your own blog was privated and not archived, which makes some things difficult. But news reposts from other sources were helpful! Back in Jan 2010, Digital Foundry did an excellent cover of your work on the PS3's hypervisor attack [1] Grabbing some choice quotes from that article: - "the all-important decryption keys are held entirely in the SPU and can't be read by Hotz's new Hypervisor calls" - "The