FreeDVDBoot – Hacking the Playstation 2 through its DVD player

Apparently you can use FreeDVDBoot in order to install Free MCBoot, which helps a lot since you would no longer have to find a friend with a Free MCBoot memory card or buy one off of Ebay.

https://www.psx-place.com/threads/tutorial-fmcb-installation...

Isn't it interesting how these sort of exploits exist for probably every hardware/software out there, just that they are never discovered? Since the amount of people with the knowhow for reverse engineering, discovering, and actually building something out of the exploit is so miniscule.

I'm curious how much manual effort it takes for an individual to break this kind of protections. I understand that you basically try one exploit after another, but is there a smart way to automate this? For example, AFL can give you a lot of test samples, but burning and testing tens of thousands of DVDs for potential code path doesn't seem to be feasible, so ideally one would put many cases - but that can't apply to e.g. DVD headers and crafting the test cases sound like a total pain. On the other hand, if one achieved that, they could do some sort of binary search to figure out which exploits work. Perhaps the trick is to plug in a modified DVD reader in order to automate the process?

I guess that my question is: is there something like AFL, but instead of generating many test cases, tries to create a big one containing as many potential crashes as possible?

I find it likely that similar exploits can be found in other dvd-playback-enabled consoles

This is a great article and exploit. Good job and thanks for the learning experience.

This is great news. The PS2 was the last console I ever bought.