Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

The PS5 has a major bug bounty program. The author decided to look into this device, being a legend in the playstation hacking scene. After looking at the attack surface, they decided to look at the Playstation 2 emulator. This was because the JIT privileged code had been removed from other part of the system and it would be unpatchable once fund.

Initially, the author needed code execution within the context of the game while in the emulator. This was done by using a known save game exploit from Okage Shadow King, with a standard buffer overflow in the player/town name. Since the PS2 had no exploit mitigations, this was trivial to do.

Now, it was time to reverse engineer the emulator itself. While reviewing the code for memory read/write callbacks, the author noticed a missing bounds check on the buffered operations. This would allow for writing 16 times the allowed amount of data; this bug had several variants of it in other locations.

By using the first vulnerability, we can overwrite a status index being used. Using this, we gain the ability to write an arbitrary byte to an offset of 4 bytes. Since this is relative to a static buffer, ASLR can be defeated with the relative write.

The vulnerability above allows us to corrupt a set of function pointers within the program. Since no CFI is enabled on this, this allows for arbitrary functions to be called. Additionally, this returns a value in EAX, which could be used for a very strange read call.

The PS5 has ASLR turned on, which needs to be defeated. One way would have been using Spectre-like side channel attack. In this case, they found that using a relative overwrite on the function pointer allowed (which was written to EAX), to return instantly allowed for the leaks of pointers.

From this leak, they could gather the offsets they needed for the rest of the eboot binary; they knew where the executable, read/write and read only pages were. This allowed for further gadget created within this part of the ecosystem. They found a gadget to leak the stack address, using the code execution technique above.

Single code gadgets are nice, but not powerful enough. Instead, the author wanted to be able to execute arbitrary ROP chains of multiple gadgets at a time by pivoting the stack pointer. To pivot the stack several nested calls had to be made to control the value in ESP.

To load a custom game, a few things could be done, such as USB ports or networking. The program had to be put into a recognizable state but arbitrary PS2 games could now be loaded to the system. In part 2, they will get arbitrary code execution outside the emulator for a homebrew-like experience.