Re:Hacking the PS Vita
by gambiting on Sunday June 21, 2015 @06:07PM
(#9755192)
The only thing standing between anyone executing their code on PS4 or Xbox One is a valid signing certificate. If you had it, or if you could trick the system into thinking it doesn't need one, you could just burn your data to a BD disc, or try running it from a USB stick. On the Vita you don't even have an attack vector. It uses propriatery cards for both games and extra storage,with no commercial readers/writers available. I have a Vita Devkit at work and the only way Sony provides for devs to write/read from these cards is through the devkit itself,it has an extra Mini-USB port to connect to PC through special connection. It's super secure from what it looks like.
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Well if I can be pedantic for a second, "valid signing certificate" is much harder to find than any software exploit. In fact if you can find it without physically stealing the certificate, you just broke modern cryptography. And on the vita, if you can sign code, I can load it for you over wifi by faking an update package ;)
Yep, of course - but the PSP was originally broken by tricking the firmware into thinking that literally everything has a valid certificate. MS Pro Duo readers were popular, you could easily grab the eboot.pub and modify it yourself. With the Vita, if you haven't got a devkit you don't even know what the file layout on the memory card looks like.
Even if you had a devkit, you still won't know. The devkit is just as sandboxed and there's an additional processor whose sole job is to enforce security on the debugger and PC communications.
Really? My devkit just shows the memory card as another storage device when I plug it in, I can freely copy files to/from it. But granted, I only had to use it a few times, mostly work with PS4/X1 nowadays, so maybe I have missed something.