It’s been an important week for the PS vita hacking scene, with the release of the Vita Rejuvenate hack, the very first native hack on the PS Vita, by Yifan Lu.

Today, the hacker (who’s also known for being the first hacker to run custom code on the kindle touch, back in the days) reveals how he worked on exploiting the device, through a lengthy and super interesting blog post.

As Yifan Lu mentions, the majority of the post was actually written back in 2012, when he initially found the exploit. The reason we had to wait for so long before a release was that Yifan Lu was waiting for the exploit to be patched, or for another one to be found, before he would reveal this one. As of today, the exploit still exists in PSM, but PSM is being deprecated by Sony, hence the decision for the release.

Yifan Lu first explains how he approached the “black box” that is the vita, without access to the internals of the device, and how he decided to target the PSM and run a privilege escalation on it. The thought process is just extremely interesting to read. He also details how Sony counterattacked after he publicly released the source code for UVLoader (the homebrew loader used in Rejuvenate). By analyzing YifanLu’s work, they were able to slow down some of the hack progress, albeit never patching the critical bits. It’s interesting how an attempt to help the scene actually ended up going against it, in a way.

I’ll let you read the actual article for all the details… and I’ll leave you with this historic video, published by Yifan today: the very first RAM dump of the ps vita, made back in 2012: