HBL

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HBL confirmed to run fine on Vita’s firmware 1.52  

January 21, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita, security | 23 comments

Today developer SKFU was able to confirm that my port of HBL to Teck4′s exploit is still working on 1.52 (this also means that Teck4′s exploit is still here on 1.52, which had been confirmed by mamosuke a few days ago). He also confirmed that the potential vulnerabilities and other stuff he’s found so far are still available in vita 1.52, so it’s relatively safe to upgrade to 1.52 if you own a Vita (I am myself still on 1.51). On Twitter he also posted a picture of a homebrew running through HBL.

I want once again to thank Teck4 for the trust he put in me with this exploit, and for agreeing with the idea of making this exploit available to trusted people like SKFU before we attempt any public release.

source SKFU



Vita firmware 1.52 does *not* patch Teck4′s exploit  

January 17, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita, security | 42 comments

Mamosuke confirmed to me today that Teck4′s exploit for the PSP Emulator in the vita is still working on 1.52. Note that it doesn’t guarantee 100% that some of the techniques used to get HBL to work on top of this exploit haven’t been patched, as I haven’t tested myself. But for now I’m confident. I might update to test that, at some point.

The 1.52 Vita firmware can be downloaded here

HBL for Teck4′s exploit succesfully ported and updated to EU/US versions  

January 11, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita | 40 comments

I managed to port HBL to the US version of Teck4′s exploit in exactly 45 minutes (including writing the savedata exploit and the binary loader),  which is a new personal record, thanks to the scripts included in HBL’s repository, and also to the fact that the different versions of the game are internally fairly similar (which is to be expected because technically the game is supposed to be the same, just translated, but I seem to recall it wasn’t that easy for the Hotshots golf exploit)

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A FAQ for HBL on the Vita  

January 10, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita | 40 comments

We’ve seen through Teck4′s exploit that PSP exploits run flawlessly on the PSP emulator of the Vita. I’ve spent the past 3 weeks working on leveraging Teck4′s exploit and port HBL to it. I’ve been receiving lots of questions (probably from people who haven’t used HBL back when it was the only possible way to play homebrews on the PSP Go) and will try to answer them here.

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A few homebrews that run on the Vita HBL  

January 9, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita | 38 comments

In the past days I stabilized HBL for Teck4′s exploit and got some major homebrews to work. In the video below I’m showing a few homebrews running on the PS Vita. I also included Picodrive again to show that fixing the sound issue is relatively easy as it is just a setting in the emulator. Check the video below. Read the rest of this entry »

HBL on the Vita, progress report  

January 2, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita | 36 comments

A quick report: I’m making some progress on porting HBL to the Vita. Although I’m sad to say that I can’t get syscall estimation to work, I got some major homebrews such as Doom to run already, so overall I think it’s in an acceptable shape. Because it is roughly stable now, today I focused on porting HBL to the EU version of the exploited game (I was working – obviously – on the Japanese version of the game so far). This went smoothly and I can confirm HBL runs fine on the EU version of the game, although of course I could only test on a PSP, not on a Vita.

I used the opportunity to refresh my two guides, how to write a binary loader and how to port HBL. The guides are now simplified, and the binary loader tutorial now has download links to the tools used in the examples.

Writing the first “usable” version of HBL for the patapon exploit took several developers and about 4 months. Thanks to the portability of HBL, bringing it to Teck4′s exploit took me only a few days. Adapting that to the EU version took a couple hours (including porting the exploit itself), so I am confident for the US version.

The PS Vita is Doomed  

January 1, 2012 in HBL, PS Vita | 27 comments

A year and a half ago when I got Doom for PSP to run on the PSP Go, website hackaday noticed it and said “[being able to run Doom is] a prerequisite for any cracked device”. Some people try to run Linux on their hardware at all cost, I prefer Doom. Today I was able to tweak HBL a bit on the PS Vita to get Doom to run on it. Will I get hackaday’s attention this time too? :) That’s, hands down, the best fps available on the vita so far, check the video below!

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HBL running on the PS Vita, Sonic says Hi  

December 27, 2011 in HBL, PS Vita, security | 90 comments

Update: one important clarification: this video shows HBL running on the latest firmware 1.510. The firmware update that happened today does not patch the exploit, unlike what some sites are saying.

A few days ago Japanese developer Teck4 posted a picture of a “hello world” running on the PS Vita through the PSP emulator. I contacted him immediately with some help from Mamosuke, and I soon got enough information to start working on porting Half Byte Loader to this exploit (note that Teck4 is also working on exploiting this vulnerability further, but I don’t know how far he’s been).

What you see in the video below is the game “Sonic & Knuckles” running in picodrive, a Megadrive emulator for the PSP.

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PS Vita Exploit confirmed, HBL on its way  

December 23, 2011 in HBL, PS Vita, security | 57 comments

Last week, an exploit on the PS Vita through the PSP emulator was announced by Mamosuke. The exploit was found by Teck4, and, we won’t stress it enough, is a PSP exploit that gives us user mode access within the PSP emulator on the Vita. So this is not a Vita exploit per se, but it’s still very cool. Mamosuke confirmed this with a video a few days ago, and today I was able to confirm the exploit myself as shown in the video below (and I must admit that I spent way too much time working on that basic flame effect). The video below shows the exploit running on both a PSP 1000 and the PS Vita.

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Day-1 Hello World, the PS Vita already hacked?  

December 18, 2011 in HBL, PS Vita, security | 78 comments

Japanese PSP scener Mamosuke announced today on his blog that he was able to confirm a “Hello World” running on the PS Vita through the embedded PSP emulator. The exploit was made by developer teck4, and most likely relies on one of our good buffer overflow friends. and for those who are wondering “is it real?”, my current answer is that I haven’t tried it yet, but knowing Mamosuke fairly well I can tell you it’s true.

Technically, the idea behind the hack is simple but brilliant: the PS Vita has a PSP emulator, and we have plenty of PSP game exploits lying around… can we assume they will work on the emulator? That’s what teck4 tried, and the answer is yes, so he managed to run unsigned code on the PS Vita.

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