PS3 hacking ahoy! Overflow .tiff exploit discovered

Not long after Segher and Brushing demonstrated a savegame exploit on the Nintendo Wii, Team ICE came forward with an exploit of their own for the Sony PlayStation 3. Yet again it involves a .TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file, but this time it invokes a specific error in the heap data area of Sony’s next generation console. More information at the full story.

Recently Team ICE discovered that they could crash a Sony PlayStation 3 using a well-crafted .TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file loaded in the Sony PS3’s XMB. And the team has released that same .TIFF to the public yesterday, targeted at Sony next-generation consoles running on firmware version 2.10, regardless if it’s PAL or NTSC native.

Similar to past revelations, this .TIFF exploit does cause an overflow, only this one wrought havoc on the Sony PlayStation 3’s heap data area. Some have also noted that the file released contains the words “Tavis Ormandy” in hex code – a misspelling of Travis Ormandy, a member of Google’s Security Team, we speculate – which somehow links this to the .TIFF jailbreaking of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, though coincidental.

Team ICE calls it a heap overflow and will permit other aspirant hackers on injecting simple code if they know the backend number and what calls to make. However, they didn’t attempt to test the full potential of the .TIFF exploit because they lack the resources to do so.

But the team made it clear that PlayStation ISOs cannot be played with this exploit – at least not yet. They say that hackers might need Sony’s PlayStation 3 Software Development Kit (SDK) to expand upon this latest exploit and see how far they can push with homebrew development.