PS Vita 3.63 jailbreak – when will a HENkaku hack be released for PS Vita firmware 3.63?
Several people have been contacting me inquiring about the future possibility to exploit PS Vita firmware with HENkaku 3.63. The majority of the audience of this blog has been enjoying HENkaku on firmware 3.60, but a growing number of users are left in the cold, stuck on firmwares 3.61 or 3.63. So I expect the questions related to a PS Vita 3.63 downgrader, or a PS Vita 3.63 jailbreak, HENkaku 3.63, or a PS Vita hack for higher firmwares to increase with time.
TL,DR: The best way to get a hacked PS Vita is to get yourself a PS vita running firmware 3.60. The Borderlands bundle is the safest bet (ensure you buy it new, not used).
Is there, or will there be a PS Vita 3.63 Vita Jailbreak (HENkaku 3.63)?
The short answer is no. You can however run and install a PSP Custom Firmware (ARK) on your 3.63 PS Vita, as of February 2017.
The long answer is more nuanced, but still ends with a “no”. Think about it, it took about 5 years for the first “real” Vita hack to surface. And hopefully, the various explanations that have been posted by Team Molecule and others about the hack have proven that it was not a small achievement. HENkaku required several hacks and tricks to work. HENkaku 3.63 would require the same amount of work.
It’s not clear to me how many of these vulnerabilities have been patched by Sony (the user Mode webkit exploit was definitely patched), but it’s safe to assume they did not only patch the webkit vulnerability.
Basically, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that a similar scope of work (as what happened for HENkaku) would be required for a new Vita HENkaku 3.63 exploit to be released on newer firmwares. In other words, years.
With that being said, hackers now have access to more information about the Vita than Team molecule had. It is not a black box anymore, and with access to the system, I assume some groups are hard at work reverse-engineering the Firmware to find more vulnerabilities. But this is not the PSP days anymore, where the system had very limited protection. Here again, Yifan Lu and Xyz have made a point of showing how complex it is to fool the Vita securities.
However, hackers Hexkyz and St4rk have both claimed they have found Kernel exploits in the PS Vita. None of them has released anything though, although it’s pretty certain they did have to have access to such exploits in order to break the Henkaku Challenge.
How about a PS Vita 3.63 downgrader then?
A downgrader would basically imply that Sony’s private keys are leaked or that their security is completely taken down. According to everyone I’ve asked, this scenario is highly unlikely.
Alternatively, it would mean a Kernel exploit with the ability to patch the system in Ram, which wouldn’t really be a downgrade anymore, just another kernel exploit for Firmware 3.63. So a downgrader is probably even more unlikely to happen than a 3.63 Jailbreak.
People have contacted me, offering to donate money to fund a “bounty” for a PS Vita 3.63 downgrader or exploit. I’d like to remind everyone that we have attempted this in the past, with a total bounty of about $2000. This gave us Rejuvenate, from the very same person who gave us HENkaku, Yifanlu. Nobody else ever even tried to suggest something else: Rejuvenate was literally the only entry for that bounty, despite it running for months.
So I don’t think money is the issue here, unless, as I’ve told to the people who have suggested it, unless you have somewhere between $10’000 and $50’000 to give away. That kind of money might motivate the people with the right skills who weren’t thinking of doing it for free in the first place.
However, it’s been confirmed that hardware “downgrading” is possible by swapping your PS Vita’s 3.63 motherboard with a PS Vita 3.60 motherboard. These can be bought for about $40 on Aliexpress, however there is significant risk of permanently damaging your PS Vita if you attempt such a hardware replacement yourself. My advice is to chip in a bit more money and get yourself a full fledged 3.60 Vita, but see below for details.
What hacking options exist for Users on Vita 3.63?
The only software based option at this point on Vita firmware 3.63 is a PSP Custom Firmware. You can install popular Custom Firmware ARK on Vita 3.63 by following these steps. The same technique can be used to install tools such as VHBL (pictured above) although ARK is the most powerful ePSP tool at the moment.
Do not trust websites that claim to have HENkaku or a PS Vita Jailbreak for 3.63 today. These sites are usually scamming you into answering surveys or clicking ads for which they get paid. HENkaku is not available for 3.63, and if it ever becomes available for those, trusted scene sites such as wololo.net will be the first ones to talk about it.
PS Vita 3.63 hack: The conclusion
Bottom line, a 3.63 Vita native hack, or HENkaku 3.63 is unlikely to happen in the months to come, and for now your best option is ARK. So, if you have $100 to donate for the scene, instead get yourself a PS Vita running firmware 3.60.
First
people like you *** me off.
A smell some deja vu, oh yeah, right after 3.61, *insert some eurobeat*
Click Bait! Click Bait! Click Bait!
This isn’t click bait, it’s a preemptive strike to prevent people from asking stupid things.
Nope it’s click bait, maybe you should research what the word means.
I cannot imagine the pain if I accidently update my Vita above 3.60……….I would feel like the most humiliated and broke person on this earth 🙁
Mee too bro
i m feeling like this
You should consider some kind of Little Banner that Scrolls and Just says
“Henkaku on >3.60 is a No-No.”
Your clickbait “No” posts are getting obnoxious as heck….
Jailbreak is for iPhones…
But people don’t visit the links if it doesnt have the word ‘Jailbreak’.
Using the word Jailbreak gets more clicks = more ad money 🙂
jailbreak is a general term, it can be applied to any device, the term “jailbreak” means removing the walls, the sandbox, that was placed by the developer, yea I’d say the vita has gone further past jailbreak, but the term isn’t apple exclusive, its just the term that became the most popular in that community
Loved the article VICE published recently about Henkaku and saw they interviewed you as well, Wololo. Love the media attention for the scene haha great read for anyone interested in a quick summary of the scene’s development. YifanLu has a link for it posted on his twitter.
It’s sad that we need one of these articles for every new firmware.
Stop. Posting. The. Same. Article. Every. Time. There. Is. A. Firmware. Update. THIS IS CLICKBAIT. The same people dumb enough to ask for a firmware hack every update are the same people who don’t read any articles before asking the question. Do us a favor and stop posting the same thing over and over again.
and then u will just complain there is no articles instead,……there is just no pleasing people…
There’s a good reason these articles are written, it’s so that noobs find them and avoid getting to the hundreds of scam sites that pretend they have a hack for PS Vita 3.63. You’re not a noob, as such you feel this was a clickbait article. I apologize for that, this is the price we pay as a community to educate those who, unlike people like you, don’t know better. Thanks for your understanding.
Nintendo Switch hacked!!! When will a hack be released?
Something different, I know you will not like my comment: We have now since a few weeks HENkaku for 3.60… Myself, I am only a user, not a developer or coder. But what do we have now? A few emulators, that we can have on every system, some homebrew but nothing special or very useful, and the ability to play pirated games (but I don’t do this, I want to pay for good games that are developed over month or years and the game coders and developers have to earn their salary.) But is it too early to ask for a lot of homebrew games or useful tools? Or is the homebrew scene already dead? Or is it so difficult to code or port games/programs for the Vita? If I want emulators or cool homebrew, I still start my good old PSP… For what is a Vita useful today? It’s a nice peace of hardware, but where is all the cool stuff? Nothing from Sony / game developers anymore, nothing from the homebrew scene… Or am I to impatient? Anyway: Great work that HENkaku Team did, and great work of all homebrew developers / coders. I admire you!
Great article as usual! However, there is a grammar mistake. In the last paragraph of, “Is there, or will there be a PS Vita 3.63 Vita Jailbreak?” “has” must be changed to have. Just thought I’d point it out haha!
What about ps4 any news.?
Sounds like somebody needs a quick refresher on the PS3 hacking scene: the PS3, which was originally released in 2006 (6 years before the Vita was released in the US), still requires firmware 3.55 for any hacking. Custom firmware versions based on higher firmware exists, of course, but in order to install it you need to either be on 3.55, or already have a previous Custom Firmware installed (which of course required 3.55 to begin with). Long story short: the magnitude of the features and freedoms granted by the Henkaku hack makes it unlikely that any equally comprehensive hacks will surface for future firmware releases. Most of the hackers will simply stop looking, and begin developing CFW and other things based off this hack, and those who do continue looking will face tighter security.
Why not link to he original websites of yifanlu?
Why use http://wololo.net/tag/?
This greedy.
Yea i agree. Simply put. NO. And Wololo used some key words such as : motivation. That’s the problem. Back in the day, we only had the PSP. It was unique, goergeous, powerful. The gaming handheld king. Everyone loved it. Thus it sold well and even it’s games sold well despite PSP being hacked.
Today who cares about PS Vita? if you ask skilled crackers, what would create a big news headline : jailbreak PS Vita, a dead system or PS4/Pro which is flourishing?
PS Vita time has passed. We know it, Sony knows it. Smartphones and tablets killed PS Vita. And Sony greed for stupid and low quality memory cards yet very expensive. And other proprietary overpriced garbage. And when Youtube became increasingly big starting from 2011, Sony took another idiotic decision to :not release TV out cables for PS Vita or a mini HDMI cable. Even though PS Vita supported TV out from day one. People uploading to YT recorded footage ofcool PS Vita games, would have definately earned more interests.
PSP had a chance because it was the best. No competition. And the modding community was huge. That could not be said about PS Vita. Dunno why people insist on cracking PS Vita, when even Sony stopped supporting it. Crack it to play what? some Hentai garbage? skilled hackers can earn tens of thousands of $$$ in the same time they would waste jailbraking PS Vita. And they should focus on PS4 or XB1 anyway.
It’s a shame to see PS Vita go down like this. But it’s Sony’s own fault.
How about playsjailbeak.com?
I just bought a vita in 3.60, and i wanted to instal a homebrew to run PSP games. I saw it required to have a psp game or demo installed, so I went on the ps store, and it told me i have to upgrade my vita. I saw there is a lot of tutorial to downgrade the vita, so I did it, and thought i could downgrade my vita after installing the psp game.
I want to kill myself
That was silly though, as you bought it especially in ofw 3.60, knowing that would be the last possible firmware to be on as you also can’t downgrade: You still updated.
Besides you were already late for PSP. Hang on to the Vita though, it has nice cheap games on psn and in the shops.
Please dont say No!.. there are many of us (new Vita owners) that just got the device, upgraded it by not knowing entire story and are now hoping that someday someone will find a way to accomplish such monumental task (break device security scheme). Wish you guys many new exploits this year and lets hope for the best.
any feb 2017 update for 3.63?
thx
Omg .. i accidentally bought a ps vita with firmware 3.63.. fml
There is any new update for the users of vita 3.63?
hii
i don’t have any demo game on my ps vita 3.63
when i want to nstall it from the store a message tell me to update my ps vita to 3.65
soo can i insTall ark withou demo game
(sorry . for my language im from morocco )