14 DAY TRIAL // 2016 ended in big style for hackers and security researchers from all over the world, who gathered together at the well-known Chaos Communication Congress (33c3) annual event organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of Germany.
Our friend Marius Quabeck, who develops the fantastic Magic-Device-Tool batch utility that let's you install or replace your mobile OS with either Ubuntu Touch, Android, CyanogenMod, Lineage OS, Sailfish OS, Maru OS, or Phoenix OS on your mobile devices, as well as cm-t arudy from the Frech Ubuntu Loco team, was there.
But you won't believe who else was there. According to a recent blog post, it would appear that Hector Martin a.k.a. @marcan42 of the Fail0verflow team was there to showcase the exploit announced last year for running Linux and Valve's Debian-based Steam OS on Sony's PlayStation 4 gaming console with a specially crafted PS4 firmware.
"Last year we demoed Linux on the PS4. Since then, we’ve gotten 3D graphics working, polished a number of drivers, and wrote some new ones. Linux on the PS4 is now actually quite a usable OS, with some minor caveats. We can run Steam OS and many games stably (e.g. Portal 2, but most games that run well on Linux should work)," reads the announcement.
The current kernel is based on Linux 4.9
According to the Fail0verflow team, the patched kernel used to run Steam OS on PlayStation 4, which now supports firmware 4.05, is based on the latest Linux 4.9 kernel announced by Linus Torvalds in the first days of December 2016. However, it looks like they won't make their exploit public at the moment, as they believe that there are some capable devs out there to write their own exploits for the PS4 userland.
The full presentation can be watched in the video attached below, if you weren't lucky enough to attend 33c3 last year, which focused mostly on the hardware part than on the exploit one. The clip shows Hector Martin explaining how the Fail0verflow team got binary kernel dumps via a hardware PCI Express man-in-the-middle attack, as well as Radeon reverse engineering tools.
All of their work is available publicly on GitHub for anyone interested in running Linux on PlayStation 4. In the meantime, Fail0verflow will concentrate their efforts on PS4 Pro support, which currently boots Linux, but there's still some patching to be done for the GPU driver. PlayStation 4 support to the newer AMDGPU kernel driver, along with performance switching and power management improvements, is on the list too.
