PS Vita PSP Exploit Confirmed

Published on 12-24-2011 03:06 AM

26 Comments

Recently we brought you news regarding an exploit running on the PS Vita here. Reading over at Wololo's blog, Wololo has tested the exploit himself by running Half-Byte Loader. For those of you who are not aware "Half-Byte Loader is an open source Homebrew Loader for the Sony PSP. It allows you to play fan-made games on any PSP up to firmware 6.39. HBL allows you to run emulators for the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, Sega Megadrive, NES, Super NES." Please note that this does not mean the PS Vita is hacked wide open. As Wololo stresses below this exploit gives user mode through the PSP emulator on the PS Vita. It is essentially a PSP exploit running on the PS Vita.

To Quote:

Last week, an exploit on the PS Vita through the PSP emulator was announced by Mamosuke. The exploit was found by Teck4, and, we won’t stress it enough, is a PSP exploit that gives us user mode access within the PSP emulator on the Vita. So this is not a Vita exploit per se, but it’s still very cool. Mamosuke confirmed this with a video a few days ago, and today I was able to confirm the exploit myself as shown in the video below (and I must admit that I spent way too much time working on that basic flame effect). The video below shows the exploit running on both a PSP 1000 and the PS Vita.

I spent a good amount of time today confirming some of my hopes that it will be possible to run HBL, at least to some extent, with that exploit. It doesn’t mean I have ported HBL to the Vita yet, but I have strong hopes this will be possible. A handful of hackers are working on bringing HBL to the Vita (I won’t mention their names here as I don’t know if they want to be contacted on the subject), and it should be “relatively” easy to get something to work fairly soon. (It should be noted though that the Vita is quite sensitive and crashed on me several times when it went into “sleep” mode from the exploit screen… from there – am I just paranoid? – it seems it is impossible to reboot the machine for almost 10 minutes, which made me think I had bricked my vita… could it be a anti-hacking security? If the console detects several crashes, it takes longer to boot, in order to prevent brusteforce types of attacks?)

I won’t discuss any release yet, it doesn’t depend on me only (this is, after all, Teck4′s exploit), but if I have my opinion to give on the subject, I would suggest to wait until the Vita is released in Europe and in the US. This gives us some time to polish HBL on this device, and hopefully the vulnerabilities we use to run HBL won’t have been patched by then.

This is of course just a challenge with little to no practical interest… once we publicly reveal the exploit (in particular, the game used in it), it will be extremely easy for Sony to patch it (or remove the game from the Playstation Store), so probably only a few people will be able to benefit from it… but only time will tell, there is still hope, after all, that Sony doesn’t care about a tool that allows us to run user mode psp homebrews in a sandboxed emulator.

Thanks to Teck4 who found the exploit. I do hope you keep it under wraps till the rest of the would receives a PS Vita.

Source: wololo.net

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PS Vita PSP Exploit Confirmed
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26 Comments

BahumatLord - 12-25-2011, 12:42 AM
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I understand that it only allows psp homebrew. Not everyone here just glances at the title and doesn't read the post. And how am I being selfish? I don't own one and don't plan on owning one for at least 2 years until the bugs have been worked out and it's a more reasonable price. Does anyone remember how clunky and problematic the first generation PSP was? I have no vested interest in the development of the vita whatsoever I just know that one exploit leads to another and another and another and if you tip your hand too early then the first exploit is patched that much earlier and does create problems down the road for developers. I'm talking about long term development, not just a quick fix that will be short lived. And didn't you post earlier pretty much the same thing about waiting that I did? Don't you have anything better to do than to try to make yourself seem better/smarter/whatever than other people on here? I didn't say anything that was wrong. I've been around long before sony put out it's first playstation. Hell, I was around in the Commodore 64 days. I've seen this kind of thing happen before so I'm not talking out of my ass. But hey, what I said was an opinion, not a statement of fact or prophecy of the future and I stand by it. Oh, and I guess I did pick a side.

ahou - 12-25-2011, 12:46 AM
- Reply
Originally Posted by Thorn

actuly the longer we wait the less of a chance sony would patch it >.< this has always been a game of cat and mouse with sony they dont change their habits

If hackers can find an exploit in 1 day, sony can probably find it within 2 months before it releases in the us. And this time, the exploit relies on a game from psn, so as soon as they find it, no one will be able to use it, except those who already downloaded it, it won't be available to everyone who doesn't upgrade to a newer firmware.

Darkman-PSG - 12-25-2011, 02:20 AM
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Originally Posted by BahumatLord

I understand that it only allows psp homebrew. Not everyone here just glances at the title and doesn't read the post. And how am I being selfish? I don't own one and don't plan on owning one for at least 2 years until the bugs have been worked out and it's a more reasonable price. Does anyone remember how clunky and problematic the first generation PSP was? I have no vested interest in the development of the vita whatsoever I just know that one exploit leads to another and another and another and if you tip your hand too early then the first exploit is patched that much earlier and does create problems down the road for developers. I'm talking about long term development, not just a quick fix that will be short lived. And didn't you post earlier pretty much the same thing about waiting that I did? Don't you have anything better to do than to try to make yourself seem better/smarter/whatever than other people on here? I didn't say anything that was wrong. I've been around long before sony put out it's first playstation. Hell, I was around in the Commodore 64 days. I've seen this kind of thing happen before so I'm not talking out of my ass. But hey, what I said was an opinion, not a statement of fact or prophecy of the future and I stand by it. Oh, and I guess I did pick a side.

No you are telling the truth... ima tell you what the hackers did wrong
1. Releasing anything hell it havent even been 10 days and they already found a loop hole in it
2. Sony will make future implementations for the US/EUR Version
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY the hackers TOLD what they did and how they did it...

But idk you HAVE to side on Sony with this one... do you REALLY want this beautiful machine to be like the psp? Nobody would make games for it... I see alot of great things for the vita and for once I hope Sony patch this really soon... I am okay with the psp emulator and having the home brew but I dont want the vita being ****ed up by hackers bootlegging the shit out of it... people can say what they want but I dont want this console being fully hacked

ahou - 12-25-2011, 03:11 AM
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3. MOST IMPORTANTLY the hackers TOLD what they did and how they did it...

Not yet they didn't?

BahumatLord - 12-25-2011, 03:34 AM
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Originally Posted by Darkman-PSG

But idk you HAVE to side on Sony with this one... do you REALLY want this beautiful machine to be like the psp? Nobody would make games for it...

It isn't too often that I agree with you but you're right about 3rd party developers not putting out games for a new console if they think it's got security holes and they won't be paid for their work. Development did drop off drastically for the psp after the the 5.00m33 days of the psp. If it's free, then it's for me, and I'm not siding with Sony exactly, but there needs to be a solid foundation for a console otherwise it won't survive and in the end the only ones that will suffer will be the gamers of the world. If this system does end up getting cracked wide open and stay wide open early on in the process, it will just end up being a system killer. I have to say to any developers out there to please wait at least 6-12 months after the consoles hit all markets before anything further is released. It may not sound like a long time, but by that point there will be a fair number of games in final stages of development and also a fair number of games from third parties starting to be worked on and the system will have a good enough foothold to survive if the console does get cracked completely open. It would be a shame if this ended up going the way of other systems that showed promise but didn't have enough support. If anybody thinks I'm full of it, then look what happened to Sega. Their last console, the Dreamcast, all you had to do to play bootlegs for 90 percent of their games was just burn a copy. When the system came out, it wasn't an issue because burners were too expensive for most people, but as prices came down and people started just to pirate everything on it, the system died. Not only the system, but the hardware division of Sega as well died with it. This was just due to the start of cheap production of cd burners that it became a problem for them. They were the only competition for Nintendo for what, 10 years? Towards the end they lost all their quality 3rd party support and couldn't keep their console division alive and now they are just another game developer instead of the giant that they once were. Personally I would have rather seen Sega survive the console wars over Nintendo. If Sega was still in the game, I bet they would give Sony and Microsoft a run for their money but we've got nobody to blame for that but ourselves

yes159 - 12-27-2011, 07:35 AM
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Originally Posted by RobseRob

The bootrom on iOS devices can never be updated through any kind of software, it is a ROM.

Yeah, if it is just a ROM chip (and not EPROM), then it cant be updated via software indeed. So there are things that can be unpatchable through software. With OtherOS, the hack also relied on hardware tinkering, which might me wonder if it was really possible to patch up OtherOS. But i'm not sure, that is why i'd like to get techincal details on how it could be patched through a software update.