PlayStation 3 homebrew

Homebrew software was first run on the PlayStation 3 by a group of hackers under the name "Team Ice" by exploiting a vulnerability in the game Resistance: Fall of Man.

This event caused backlash among the hacker communities, and eventually the group Fail0verflow found a flaw in the generation of encryption keys which they leveraged to restore the ability to install Linux.

[2][3] At the 2010 Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin, a group calling itself fail0verflow announced it had succeeded in bypassing a number of the PlayStation 3's security measures, allowing unsigned code to run without a dongle.

[7] On January 3, 2011, geohot published the aforementioned private key, represented in hexadecimal as C5 B2 BF A1 A4 13 DD 16 F2 6D 31 C0 F2 ED 47 20 DC FB 06 70, as well as a Hello world program for the PS3.

[13][14] To allow for homebrew using the newly discovered encryption keys, several modified versions of system update 3.55 have been released by Geohot and others.

One week later, tutorials became available allowing users to download PSN content for free, using fake (rather than stolen) credit card numbers.

[20] While some sources blamed Rebug for the subsequent intrusion to Sony's private developer network, Time's "Techland" described such theories as "highly—as in looking down at the clouds from the tip-top of Mount Everest highly—speculative".

Sony has worked numerous times to try and patch the BG Toolset, but as of June 20th, 2024, it still remains as the primary entry point for the custom firmware scene on the PlayStation 3.

This exploit was released in the absence of the BG Toolset as its websites, along with numerous other popular jailbreaking sites, had their domains seized.