The PlayStation 2 just celebrated its 20th birthday on March 4. Although the console is quite dated, it still has many fun and enjoyable games. Its age also makes it a great candidate for playing and creating homebrew titles, since voiding your warranty is no longer an issue if you mod the hardware.
Modding the PlayStation 2's hardware to play homebrew games and backup discs may be a thing of the past thanks to an exploit found by a security researcher. CTurt created software called FreeDVDBoot that uses the PS2's DVD player as an entry point to bypass disc checks at the software level. No hardware modification is required.
The PlayStation 2 will not load burned game discs, but it will read burned DVDs. CTurt saw this as a potential attack vector and began exploring how the PS2's optical drive plays DVDs. He eventually found that the hardware starts DVD loading by reading the disc's IFO file and writing data to a RAM cache.
Without going into the technical
details, which you can read in his blog, CTurt created a corrupted IFO file that generates a "large read overflow." Essentially, it loads an ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) file—the type used in homebrew games—into the system's cache, which is then pushed into the main memory by the overflow.
