OK guys, I'm going to have to clarify what the intent of the article was here and I'm going to admit right away that I'm not in with the CFW scene on the PS3, however I made some reasonable assumptions based on knowledge of embedded systems. In any case, the vast vast majority of PS3's can be downgraded with hardware.
In any case, it's bad news for Sony and akin to the PSP days whereby once you've installed CFW you're good forever but when you update you'll have to downgrade or hope for an exploit. Instead, a different exploit will have to be found to allow you to replace the bootloader chain.
Now the catch for CFW users is that if you're on a later firmware, you have no easy way to install a CFW - you can use hardware to replace the lvl0 with a hacked one, but later PS3 models already use a different mechanism (late slim models and all super slim) so this won't work. It means that people can create a hacked lvl0 and sign it so that bootldr will load it. Since all Firmware updates have to be read by all PS3's, they are now permanently decryptable so future CFWs aren't going to be an issue for existing consoles. The problem for Sony is that bootldr cannot be changed, it is part of the PS3's CPU and permanently set in hardware. The “lvl0” key leaked here is what bootldr uses to verify lvl0 before loading it. The next stage in the boot process is lvl0, which will then go on to load everything else. Every PS3 does, in fact, have a “unique key” inside its first stage bootloader (bootldr). The story is waaay off in terms of correctness. Perhaps Sony and the industry in general can be thankful that this leak has happened less than a year before the expected launch of the PlayStation 4. It claims that it only released the keys now, in the knowledge that a Chinese group also planned to release the keys, however, for a profit. The group that released the new CFW with LV0 master keys calls itself "The Three Musketeers". The third, long-term approach, would be to ship all new PlayStation 3 consoles from now-on with new master keys. The second would be a more proactive approach, where the firm delivers an update that will at-last generate new unique keys for consoles, preventing the use of any universal custom firmware, though, this is assuming that the LV0 key can be locked-out as an override. Going forward, Sony likely has three routes, the first would be to frequently release confusing firmware updates to keep hackers at bay long-enough to push-out the next firmware update with new security. Another is that the firm will have had the opportunity to provide a unique key for each console, however likely opted out of this to decrease the complexity of the firmware update system. Perhaps the most obvious mistake was to allow keys to leak in the first place, which were extracted through a flaw in the console's hypervisor. So where has Sony gone wrong and what can the firm do to resolve the issue? Up until now, Sony's PlayStation 3 has been the most secure of the mass-market home consoles, with initial hacks late to arrive and updates to the console's firmware stopping any further progress in its tracks. With these keys in-hand, makers of custom firmwares (CFW) can easily decrypt any future firmware updates released by Sony, remaining a step ahead of the update game likewise, modifying firmwares and preventing them from talking back to Sony HQ also becomes a much easier task. So what makes the LV0 keys so special? These are the core security keys of the console, used to decrypt new firmware updates.
This wouldn't be the first time Sony has leaked important security keys, common to every PlayStation 3 console, however, this is the first time the console's LV0 decryption keys have been let loose in the wild.