Sony Working on Blu-ray Serial Keys Scheme to Counter PS3 Hack

Sony is working on countering the recent PS3 root key leak by enforcing serial keys for all future Blu-ray dics, a method who's effectiveness is doubted by a lot of people.

Back in December, the security of the PlayStation 3 game console, has suffered a severe blow when hackers managed to recover the private key used by Sony to sign apps and games.

The hack was demoed by a team of researchers called fail0verflow at the Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin and was possible due to a logic flaw in Sony's implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).

The fail0verflow crew did not plan to release the key by itself, but rather a tool that would let homebrew developers create signed apps.

However, renowned American iPhone and PS3 hacker George Francis Hotz, aka geohot, published the key on his own website.

These actions have led to Sony filing a lawsuit against geohot, fail0verflow and around one hundred other hackers.

However, the company is clearly aware that since the key is out on the Internet, there's little they can do to stop it without blocking people's ability to play games they already own, which is obviously not an option.

TechEye reports that Sony is working on a solution for future games, which is based on a technology already implemented on the PlayStation Network for digital downloads - serial keys that work for a limited number of activations.

Under the new scheme, all future Blu-ray discs will come with an unique serial key attached that can only be used to install the game five times. According to sources, three hidden input fields have already been added on the PlayStation Network in preparation for the upcoming feature.

Meanwhile, the progress of the landmark lawsuit against geohot and the others is followed with great interest by the jailbreaking community, which has long argued that hacking into a device you bought should be legal since it is your property.

At the moment, only jailbreaking mobile phones has been exempted from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the law which deals with circumventing copyright protection.