Confirmed:Datel hacks all models of PSP & PSPGo for Christmas

Before PSPGo owners start jumping of joy all over the place, let me be clear: this information is probably not useful for you if you thought you would get the joys of homebrews and underground PSP on your PSPGo or on your PSP3000 or on your TA88v3.

A few days ago Datel announced a new Action Replay software, compatible with all models of PSPs, including the PSPGo. The PSP scene was quite suspicious regarding this announcement. Today the product page features a Demo that anyone can download and try.  I tried this Demo, other people tried the full product, and, yes, Action Replay runs on an official firmware.

It means that Datel wasn’t bluffing, and it also means that their code is signed. Only Sony is supposed to know how to sign EBOOTs, so we could think that Datel has some kind of agreement with Sony, but the documentation of the Action Replay is clear on that part:

Action Replay PSP is a 100% unofficial product and is NOT sponsored, endorsed or approved by Sony, nor any games developer or publisher.

To further confirm this, after installing the demo, you can have a look at your memory stick: Action Replay gets installed in the “UPDATE” subfolder of GAME, which is usually reserved for official Sony updates. It therefore means that Datel has figured out how to encrypt/sign EBOOTS, but needs their product to be in the UPDATE folder for some reason (easier to encrypt? Use of some specific access granted to this folder?)

Now, this is not very useful for hackers (and even less for pirates, ha). Yet another encrypted EBOOT to analyze will not bring anything. However,  Action Replay allows users to patch memory with codes, so maybe something can be crafted in order to inject unsigned code in the PSP through Action Replay, which could unlock (at least) user mode (and therefore homebrews).

For the time being, it seems Datel has done what hackers have been trying to do for almost 5 years: figuring out the PSP’s encryption process. I’ll quote Silverspring here:

Seems they have done it for real. If so, it’s finally game over for SCE. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.
Probably fw updates will attempt to block it, however all Datel need to do is release an new update. They can sign any code they want now.
They’ve finally done what was the ‘Holy Grail’ of the PSP scene. Pretty impressive work

Who knows, maybe Datel will now come up with their own Custom firmware…