The Vita’s Content Manager allows you to backup and restore games, saves, and system settings. These backups are encrypted (but not signed!) using a key derived in the F00D processor. While researching into F00D, xyz and Proxima stumbled upon a neat trick (proposed originally by plutoo) that lets you obtain this secret key and that has inspired me to write a set of tools to manipulate CMA backups. The upshot is that with these tools, you can modify backups for any Vita system including 3.63 and likely all future firmware. This does not mean you can run homebrew, but does enable certain tricks like disabling the PSTV whitelist or swapping X/O buttons.
State of the Vita 2016
Although it hasn’t been a good year for all of us, 2016 was a great year for the Vita. In August, molecule released the first user-friendly Vita hack which builds on four years of research and a year of building a SDK platform from scratch. Since then, we saw dozens of homebrews, new hackers showing up in the scene, and the creation of a community that I am proud to be a part of. In November, I released taiHEN, a CFW framework that makes it easy to extend the system and to port future hacks. As such, it was a busy year for molecule. We are a team of five individuals and we served as pen testers, exploit writers, web developers, UI designers, web masters, IT, moderators, PR, recruiters, software architects, firmware developers, support, and lawyers for the Vita hacking community. These are roles we took out of necessity because Vita hacking is such a niche interest. However, these are not roles we can hold forever. Back in November, I said that I (and I am assuming the rest of molecule but I do not speak for them) would retire from the scene after taiHENkaku was stable enough and that time has finally come. Aside from a parting gift from Davee that should be released in a couple of days we will be retiring from all non-research tasks. Since we entered the scene with no drama, no bullshit, and no corruption, we will leave in the same manner. Firstly, all our work are either already open sourced or are in the process of being tidied up and released. Second, we have extensively documented all our findings on the Vita with the exception of our TrustZone (lv1) hacks which we left out at the request of other hackers who wish to try the challenge without aid. Lastly, we revamped the process for setting up development and making homebrew is easier than ever. Fixing the toolchain required a lot of boring and tedious work and I want to thank everyone who helped with the process. I am proud that our toolchain is the only unofficial toolchain that was designed rather than hacked together.
Designing taiHEN: A CFW Framework
I take software design very seriously. I believe that the architecture side of software is a far more difficult problem than the implementation side. As I’ve touch upon in my last post, console hackers are usually very bad at writing good code. The code that runs with hacks are usually ill performing and unstable leading to diminished battery life and worse performance. In creating taiHEN, I wanted to do most of the hard work in writing custom firmwares: patching code, loading plugins, managing multiple hooks from different sources so hackers can focus on reverse engineering and adding functionality.
taiHEN: CFW Framework for PS Vita
Ever since I first bought the Vita, I have dreamed of running a custom firmware on it. I don’t mean just getting kernel code running. I want an infrastructure for adding hooks and patches to the system. I want a system for patching that was properly designed (or actually has a design), clean, efficient, and easy to use. That way, firmware patches aren’t a list of hard coded offset and patches. I’ve seen hacks that busy loops the entire RAM looking for a version string pattern so it can replace it with a custom text. I’ve seen hacks that redirect the “open” syscall so every file open path is string compared with a list of files to redirect. The examples go on and on. Needless to say, good software design is not a strong point for console hacking. For HENkaku, we did not commit any major software development sins, but the code was not perfect. It had hard coded offsets everywhere, abuse of C types, and lots of one-off solutions to problems but it got the job done. Part of the reason we didn’t want to release the source right away was that we didn’t want people to build on that messy code-base (the other reason was the KOTH challenge). I remember the dark days of 3DS hacking where every homebrew that needed kernel access would just bundle in the exploit code. This is why I decided to create taiHEN.
HENkaku KOTH Solved
When HENkaku was first released, we posed to the community the KOTH challenge to get more hackers interested in the Vita. This week, two individuals have separately completed the challenge and are the new kings of Vita hacking! Mike H. and st4rk both proved that they have the final encryption key, showing that they solved the kernel ROP chain. I highly recommend reading their respective posts as they give some great insight into how hacking works. I also know of a third group who might have also completed the challenge but wishes to keep quiet for now. Congratuations to them too!