India, Jan. 2 -- At the end of December 2025 / start of January 2026 a set of BootROM keys for the PlayStation 5 were published online. If these 'Master Keys' are valid, they reveal secrets embedded in the PS5 silicon that form the hardware root of trust and chain of security. That makes some attacks much easier.

The BootROM is code permanently burned into the console's chip (read-only memory). During power-on the BootROM verifies the next stage (bootloader/firmware) using cryptographic checks - for example verifying a digital signature or decrypting signed code using keys stored in ROM. Those keys are part of the hardware root of trust: they're set at manufacture and cannot be changed by a firmware update. When those keys leak, attacker...