lol x wrote:
so coldbird's(or whoever he names) exploit was just basically the same exploit??
No. At best, they were relying on the same "global" mistake in the kermit wlan implementation.
What happened with Coldbird, TN, and me is basically the following: Pro team started working on ARK a very long time ago (almost a year ago). They had access to a few kernel exploits from trusted people, but these trusted people did not want their exploits to be made public. Pro team was therefore looking for a publicly releasable kexploit, otherwise their work would be kind of wasted. In the meantime, they were making progress on porting Pro CFW to the vita, relying on those "not to be released" kexploits.
A few months later, TN Sent me his kexploit, and I sent it to Coldbird, so that Pro team would adapt ARK to it, with the explicit agreement that this would not be released until TN would make his own work public (which, at this point, we were not sure would ever happen, but we thought it would be doable to convince TN to release by December 2012, which sounded like a nice anniversary date for the Vita). I did not tell TN that I had sent his exploit to Coldbird.
While time was going on, Pro team kept improving Ark, and we were waiting to see a move on TN's end. Progressively though, additional kernel exploits were found, in particular the series of wlan kermit exploits were found by Yosh (and probably other people found some of these in parallel, independently).
By that time, the Pro team therefore had access to dozens of kexploits, some of them with no plans to release per their authors' wishes, others ok to be released (yosh's ones, mostly), and others such as TN's one which remained to be "convinced". ARK was built around that modularity of kernel/user exploits, in a way that would make it easy to port to more exploits.
As I was trying to convince TN to release his work, ARK got leaked, and it turns out some of the logic of the leaked work came from TN's exploit. Is it because Pro took inspiration from TN's work in order to guarantee ARK would be compatible with CEF? Is it because all wlan exploits were basically the same? I never investigated myself, all I have is Coldbird's word that they didn't need TN's work anymore because they had lots of other kexploits, and on the other hand TN's word that the leaked kxploit looked suspiciously similar to his work. Obviously, I shouldn't have given TN's kexploit to Coldbird in the first place, but he is the guy I trust the most in the scene, so if he tells me Ark was not reusing TN's work, I believe him more than whatever other people will tell me. I believe the nuance here is about what was reused eventually. I am assuming Pro didn't directly reuse TN's kexploit, but were using some of his ideas, somewhere. Coldbird would probably have more details if he was still around.