VHBL Status
Hi everyone. A few days ago I announced that I was working on a new VHBL release, and later on confirmed it is working on firmware 1.69. It’s been a little while and some of you are wondering why we are not seeing a release yet.
Simply, the current exploit on which VHBL relies has some pros and cons that make it not such a great candidate for the release (I can’t give much details in order to not disclose too much about the game being used for the exploit), and as I said, instead of “wasting” this one, I am trying very hard to get VHBL to work on other exploits that have been sent to me.
Please understand that this is not an easy task, since lots of people just send me a barely working crash, and most of the time I have to figure out the whole exploit all over again by myself, then test if it would be a good candidate for VHBL. and when it’s not, I have to dig very deep in the code of VHBL or in the PSP SDK documentation to see if I could find a way to get it to work.
Some of the exploits I tested recently look like they are “close” to be potentially ported to VHBL, but each one of them has a tiny glitch that prevents me from making any progress so far. One of them fails at a step where it should allow me to import some essential syscalls, another simply refuses to be correctly re-encrypted, yet another works only in some conditions and crashes in other, etc… Analyzing and testing those takes hours, and between my real-life job, family affairs, and Diablo3 (yeah…) my free time is constrained.
For those of you who would like to help, the best to do is to start looking for exploits on your own following these guides. And if you do find an exploit (and plan on sending it to me), please, be kind enough to at least write a hello world for it, and explain how to run it. I really appreciate all the help I can get, but I am tired of playing the guessing game for all the crashes I receive 🙂
As soon as I make some more progress on one of the current exploits, I will of course let you guys know.
VHBL is a homebrew loader for the Playstation Vita. It is at the time of this writing the only tool that allows you to run homebrews and emulators on Sony’s latest portable console. More details here
Keep up the great work! 🙂
A little off topic what class are you on Diablo 3? 🙂
I went with the Demon hunter for my first character 🙂
Nice choice 🙂
I went with the Monk for my first Char :3 and it makes a lot of fun, but the droprates are terrible…even with MF Find + 280% for now…
I got a lot of yellow Items but just 1% of them are useful…and 1 Legendary Bots from a Friend.
I went with a Monk and im loving it. Add me kylehassen@ymail.com. only if you want too 🙂
I went with the Witch Doctor. 🙂
Not very rewarding work)
I tried game exploit these days. And just confirmed one this morning. This is the only PSP game I bought on Vita. I didn’t bought it becoz I need a savedata exploit, but becoz I like this game.
This can’t be explained by pure luck. Instead, it suggests that savedata exploit is very common in PSP games. The coding style in games is very different from kernel modules. There’s barely any boundary check, very stupid signature check, carelessly design of savedata struct etc.
For instance in savedata there are more than one integers used for counter of sth., which are used as index into memory without being checked. If anything like this happened in kernel, it’s definitely a kexploit.
There’s barely any security concern in game programming, IMO. And I guess it’s applied to most, if not all, games.
Therefore, I tend to believe that ALL games can be exploited. It’s just a matter of time to find it.
Of course, as Wololo said that not all game exploits are useful due to this and that limitation.
So I’d suggest the following for those who are searching savedata exploits:
1. Check the imports of the game beforehand.
2. Cheaper game is better.
3. If injecting garbage in savedata doesn’t crash the game, try to set breakpoint after loading a normal savedata, and search character names to locate where the savedata is loaded in memory.
That true but Some games do try to prevent people from hacking them. One example of such a game is Monster Hunter. I think most game developer “Believe” that we won’t have access to the raw data of the savedata files therefor it not worth adding extra code for security purpose for something that is not accessible. After all, they only worry about the gaming aspect of the game and the time it take to create a game. Time is money for this people so they want to make sure that they don’t wast money on this. After all, Even if we do get to hack the game…What can we do? Change our items or change the character cloths? This doesn’t matter to them since “You” who are ruining your gaming experience while doing so or gaining more fun experience on doing so. Either way, they don’t lose as long as you buy there game. <- This what most gaming company are thinking when they publish a mobile game, If it has server based gaming, then they add a layer of security on the Server side instead of ONLY on the client side.
Moral of the Story: I love Game Developers and there concept of "Time is Money" 🙂
I totally agree with you that security is the last thing that game devs would care. It’s true in not only game companies but almost all other software vendors. And it’s really difficult to secure anything in the game, since in theory the code of the game is opened to anybody. That’s why I suggest hackers focus on quality of the game (in the sense that it has enough NIDs imported) instead of checking all possible exploits.
you’ll definitely have to tell me if you found the same one as me on this game or another lol
@wololo
Do you know if a terminal for USB exists? I want to test for exploits in the vita’s content manager.
Diablo 3, LOL
This is a great article but from my understanding this is only for psp games, due to pspLink only on modded PSPs. Because we cannot use the pspLink for vita games, which i believe is some sort of debugger, we cannot test the exploits.
In all honesty i believe a vita game exploit would be more revolutionary so we can upgrade VHBL and input vita hardware capable functions cor more RAM, two joysticks, and both touchscreen and touchpads rather than another mere psp exploit.
Furthermore what about kexploits? How would we go about finding the kexploit so we can get out of the limite access and obtain full features? I would love to see VHBL grow and evolve with the vitas true hardware.
So to sum it up, how would we go about finding both exploits and kexploits for a vita game? It would be awesome to see someone find an exploit with a free game/demo or more so a Kernal exploit. If you can, could you make an article based on these two questions explaining the methods of each and how one would attempt this? Im sure those with similar questions would love to have a detailed article how to do it.
Best Regards,
asdfADRiAN
The new exploit is on 1.69?
Which regions are there him?
watch every day here ^ __ ^ and wait xD
Please publish on Sunday en
it more chance to-get
Hes not publihing it, hes saving it. Why publish and waste kt, its just going to get patched -.-
🙂 i like your avatar.. 😀
🙂
Save it for the latest major update!
I may have a posible game that may be exploitable and could be widely used by the community, where can I send Wololo a PM or an e-mail about this?
it would be good if you actually send him the exploit with a completed binary loader, since as you’ve read he got a lot of untouched or useless exploits
Hey wololo I haven’t been here in a while but I was able to download the locoroco midnight carnival DEMO to my vita. Am I wrong but I thought psp demos didn’t work on the vita.
in fact, every psp game works on the vita. the “compatibility with Vita” is just formal as the psp emulator doesn’t have such flaws that wouldn’t allow a single game to run (i think). It’s just that they have to be repackaged for Vita, published etc, multiplied by a lot of regions, which is why not every PSP game is in PSN. Other than that, sony is probably lazy
PSP: 2 does not work on the vita >__<
The emulator is near to perfect but still needs a lot of testing to be polished out of bugs.Such can prevent games from running or make single games to behave strangely.
I’m now playing actively Pursuit Force on my Vita and I must admit that very often on sleep some problems with the game occur.Once the sound became broken, few times the Vita crashed on wake up and even once the recovey showed up which means that sth has gone terribly wrong 😀
I will talk about what I think about piracy,
I give face very hard to earn my money,
few days ago, I paid 34.99 U.S. dollars plus the ninja 3
That is stealing from people, so I am in favor
piracy, and the hacker, who charge for their findings,
is more Lateran the INDA than the Sony.
This is not related anyhow to Vita hacking so stop making such statements.
It’s all about making Vita being able to run homebrews which is a very good thing and I personally cannot understand why Sony keeps patching those.It’s not like the PSP CFW that enables piracy so they’re just restraining us without a reason
I think i understand why sony are patching our user exploits. We all know they don’t want us to have kernel exploits (ex, iso loader, Homebrews, etc). Kernel exploits are found on the PSP FW module which means if someone find an exploit on these “Special” module, then they will have to patch the system, update it and also make sure everything else is still working in the firmware. This is a lot of work for one problem which may just make them have more problem than what it worth. There also the problem that while they try to fix the first problem, someone may find another kernel exploit at the time and the WHOLE process repeat itself. So how would you kill this problem? Simple, Go to the root of it all and pull it out. User mode exploit is our only mean(That i can think of) to load Kernel exploits. Without user mode exploit, kernel exploit becomes as useless as finding a ripped $100 bill and not having anything to put it back together(Painful). Usermode exploit are also easier to fix. They are frequently cause by buffer overflow so if they make sure that the game ONLY get what it need before there an Buffer overflow, then problem solve.
If you look it at the time consumption:
It may take them about two weeks to a month to fix a kernel exploit without causing anything on the system to break.
It will only take them a day or two to fix a buffer overflow.Especially since we already found so many that they probably have a system that only need the game name, savedata structure, and what length the data should be.
So why does it take so long for sony to update the firmware with the patch? Well i am in the assumption that they already have it solve and fix by 2 days from when they first see the problem. They probably wait a bit long to see if someone else( “Eyes on wololo” lol) release another usermode exploit so that they can also patch it and release it all in one package. They also can be waiting to see if a new feature that they working on is almost done and working properly so that PSVita could get it at the same time that the exploit is being patch. “Kill three birds with one stone”.
I think sony likes this site by the ways(As long we don’t support iso) because every time we release an exploit game, they find it and patch it for the next fw. So we are doing there work for them in a way since i sure they have a team just for the purpose to find these exploit before we do.
I’m sorry, by way of writing is that I’m from Brazil,
I wololo dimiro much work, you always
reeking of the poor, I am poor, and I love
to play, the more my financial life, does not help me,
why I’m in favor of piracy, when I
was a child I had a dream, to have a game boy, but I
I never had, today I have a vita, is much more effort,
I had to work, a whole summer to get buy.
dimy93 dear friend, I’m sorry, the more I was reading an article on the ps3, and ended up writing ak sorry friend!
WOLOLO,
“make it not such a great candidate for the release, and as I said, instead of “wasting” this one”
So its not a good candidate but your worried about wasting it? So your saying its not good but you would rather release one that is terrible? Didn’t really get what you meant.
He has multiple exploits, and many of them are not good candidates as they glitch or have minor issues. It varies. Also he is not releasing the exploits he currently has because other users found it, not him; therefore, he has no permission to release it.
I wonder if VHBL can run psp homebrew on vita with high memory usage (higher than 64 MB ) which in original psp results in crash.
Can somebody tried to run Adventure game studio for psp through VHBL ?
In PSP it is very limited because of low memory, but in vita it could work better.
The issue is VHBL only uses PSP emulator, so it works as a PSP. To obtain the full memory along with Touchscreen, dual joystick and rear touchpad capabilities of the vita we must find a kernel exploit, or perhaps a exploitable vita game that will allow us to get out of the psp shell and into the vita security shell. That is where all the new features lay right now.
kernel would give you access to all of the PSP emu not the Vita >__>
That yeah and no, Kernel would let you access to all of the PSP emu on the vita but there are some prx in the kernel that access the vita harware/software(not sure at the moment) that can also be exploited to access abit more power from the vita.
The ones i am talking about are the kermit_ files. They seem to communicated with the PSVita and provide some sort of emu for stuff like IO and audio. I think the one who release the PSVita Firmware Files also manage to somewhat get control of these files and show a custom touch screen in the psx emulator he did from what i notice on the video. I could be wrong but i think it is possible to somewhat hack the psvita using a pspemu or atleast get a bit more control over the system than just what the pspemu have to offer.
As thecobra has said, thats basically what i just stated.. Sorry if ii responded unclearly it was late lol. Because we only use exploits via PSP emulator we arent actually accessing the vita itself. So that said we need to find a vita-based exploit.
ill be patient. Sorry I cannot help but I can donate. I want to play Donk Kong on SNES. In the meantime ill play Mortal Kombat, unit 13 and fifa football…
I just want to play Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
I love this blog, it’s got everything!
Knowledge, drama, suspense.
I have to get my fix daily, or I am grumpy.
¦{)
Getting a vita in a couple weeks. I demand perfection! J/K. I will be fallowing this thread like a hawk though.
Guys, you should really check this video. Some guy seems to have found a kexploit! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tBqdKGiqnI
Funny and not funny at the same time. 🙂 🙁
Me clicking on that video felt like Rick Astley getting himself rickrolled.
Haha 😀 Gotcha guys!
@wololo is it possible to get Kernel acces for the Vita by hacking the PS suite?
No, because all the things we develop with the PS-Suite are very limited and just work on the Vita in another sandboxed enviroment.
If we can get the official PS-Vita Develop Software then maybe yes….
Thanks for your answer 🙂
Is there any way to downgrade 1.69 to 1.67? Like a backup restore or something? ‘Cause right now I’m stuck at 1.69 with no VHBL 🙁
NO there isn’t
Wait so youre saying if Im on 1.67 I can run VHBL? I thought they patched all the games 😐
Just with SC3…and this game are removed from the PSN-Store for now. If it comes back to the store and you use the PS3 trick, then it works.
Sorry that comment was confusing. So if I bought SC3 via the psn store from vita or ps3? Then just transfer the game from my ps3 to my vita and install it from there?
So thats it?
Why hack ps vita same cydia(iphone)
I hope to see a vita app like cydia with tweaks and other things, that would be great, I hope some hackers read this and hopefully put that to future developement, maybe PRO might do that. or VF..
these devs are such amateurs, ive broke out of the psp emulator weeks ago…
I’m sure you did. Alas, until you release something, you’re as fake as anybody else claiming they have a hack 🙂
I’ll give you guys a month if nothing comes up I’ll shoot you an email
what kind of email? something good?
Why wait a month? Send it now. If you do, I’ll donate 5 bucks xD
I bet you’re only using this “dare” as an initiative to force devs to be more focused. Seriously. If you have proof, then show it. If you are real, I’ll donate you my extra ps vita, no joke.
Failure to reply to this message and release it within the 27th of this month, the offer will be void.
So prove it, Id like to see you try.
There’s six billion people on the planet me cracking the vita OS should be no surprise, I also know of a few devs who already accomplished this about two months ago, I don’t care about your vita I already went through a few to find it, I just want the devs on here to really dig deeper into it and find it on their own.
Like I said a month mabey two then we will see what happens..
Not to say you’re no more than anyone of us, nor any less. But why wait? I understand you could be potentially waiting for the bigger vita and ps3 updates? Nevertheless, it woudlnt hurt to demonstrate.
Also the kexpoloit, is it by a game, game demo, or through an application itself? If you found one via a demo or app like content manager, than wow props to you. Either or, still congrats on your behalf, but could you explain why the wait?
It is not software related…
im alittle confused. i keep reading different things, can someone plz clarify. if im on 1.67 can i still download the sc3 and try the exploit or am i sol. thanks. Also Wololo keep up the good work…
Thanks, you are making alot of people enjoy their system better with your hacks! WITH KNOWLEDGE comes responsiblity to share! Thanks again, take-care.
After lots of hard work and patience, I finally found a Kernel exploit. I’m not going to share it anytime soon especially with all the incoming updates as I don’t want Sony to fix this one.
A kernel exploit! oooooo shiney! O_o
So you just post it here to brag and *** us off?
I did not read anyone else’s comments, but just an idea? The psp games that had exploits originally such as Lumines etc. Maybe, I dunno much but that’s my idea.
you know, you all keep worrying about VHBL looking for PSP ISOs, and you keep trying to go for it using some sort of HEN or CFW… PSP downloads are already usable with no CFW, anyone try just converting them to a format CMA understands?
Waiting impatiently lol.
Yeah I can’t wait! Seriously playing rom on this baby is all I would need for now.
Do u have any experienced hardware hackers here Wololo?
No, sadly, I don’t personally know any hardware hacker.
There are a few ways from the I/O pins to certain areas on the mobo take a closer look…
So like, now would be pretty much a month since you last interacted with this website… Sony came up with update 1.80, so shoot, what do you have?
*Desperately shoving an old pandora battery in the vita* WORK!! WORD DAMN IT!!!! ARRRRRG!!
Hey wololo So like ill be able to play gba games on my vita when you come out with the 1.69 Exploit
Can you hack the song of the system or a program to change it?,what about a VHBL with no game full included?,because i want to play gba but i dont have those games you have to use to use the VHBL.
Ok, well guys… Sony’s PsVita new 1.80 update is out today, 🙂 guess it’s your turn to play your cards 🙂