Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC vs George Hotz

Your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own

Sony Playstation 3 Game Console

• Launched: November 11, 2006

• Developed by Sony Computer Entertainment

• Units sold: 50 million (as of March 29, 2011)

• Successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series

•Unhackable?

George Hotz aka Geohot

Age: 21Other Aliases: million75, mil, dream hax0r

• First person to unlock an Iphone. Father of the Jailbreak

• Alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program

• Worked at Google as an intern, on the Google Street View project

• Won $20,000 Intel scholarship for 3D imaging invention (called Project Holodeck)

• Has received considerable attention in mainstream media, including interviews on the Today Show, Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, G4, ABC, CNBC, and articles in several magazines and newspapers

• End of 2009 - Announced his efforts to hack the Sony PlayStation 3

• January 22, 2010 - Successfully hacked the ps3 . Enabling himself read and write access to the machine's system memory by exploiting the OtherOS  feature of the machine

• March 28 - Sony responds by releasing a firmware update that removes the OtherOS feature

OtherOS• Allowed other operating systems, such as Linux or FreeBSD, to be installed on the system

• Disabled by Sony in firmware version 3.21

• Bait and switch?

super nerds

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)- approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields

How easy is it to trip up on this function?

Can this compromise the ECC algorithm as a whole???

Is it trivial?

Is it a common mistake?

• January 6, 2011 - showed demo of running homebrew applications based on the discovery of the security exploit by the fail0verflow team.

• January 11 - Sony filed an application for a temporary restraining order against Hotz in the US District Court of Northern California.

Hotz’s computers and storage media were seized.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (DRM) that control access to copyrighted works

“The DMCA seems to cast a very wide net and will catch a lot of things besides computer security”

- Edward Felten

April 2011, it was revealed that Sony and Hotz had settled the lawsuit out of court

Electronic Frontier Foundation

When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack,the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense.

eff.org

www.omarjames.com/presentationMore info @