Court Grants Temporary Restraining Order Against PS3 Hacker

A federal judge has sided with Sony and ordered renowned PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz to remove all jailbreaking information from his website and hand over his computer equipment and digital storage media that contains it.

Earlier this month, Sony filed a complaint against George Hotz, who is better known online as "geohot," and several other hackers who managed to recover the private key used to sign all software that runs on the PlayStation 3 game console.

The key was cracked by exploiting a weakness in Sony's implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and soon afterwards geohot also published a tool that could be used to sign homemade applications.

On Thursday, US District Judge Susan Illston granted Sony a TRO [pdf] against geohot, forcing the hacker to stop distributing the "ECDSA keys, encryption and/or decryption keys, dePKG firmware decrypted program, Signing Tools, 3.55 Firmware Jailbreak, root keys, and/or any other technologies that enable access to and/or copying PS3 Systems and other copyrighted works."

Not only that, but Hotz was also ordered to actually "retrieve" the said "Circumvention Devices" and other related information from the third parties to whom he distributed it.

We're no legal experts, but it sounds like Sony expects geohot to get back information from anyone who visited his website during the past month, because the key was posted in plain text on the front page.

Of course, the company is probably aware that once its out on the Internet, they can't stop it, but they probably hope to obtain a ruling that would deter others from engaging in PS3 hacking in the future.

The most significant impact this restraining order has on Hotz results from the loss of his computers, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, USB sticks and other storage devices that contain the circumvention devices, which he has to hand over to Sony's lawyers.

The hacker's attorneys argued, apparently without success, that their client's livelihood depends on those computers. Hotz works under contract for companies who pay him to test the security of their systems.