Where are the “real” Vita hacks?

April 9th, 2012, 21:48 Posted By: wraggster

via http://wololo.net/wagic/2012/04/09/w...al-vita-hacks/

People contact me regularly to ask why I’m spending time hacking the PSP emulator of the Vita, rather than the Vita itself. Others are wondering why we haven’t seen a true vita hack yet. So, what’s the current status?



It needs to be understood that one of the main reasons the PSP was easily hacked was because it allowed unsigned content to run in its first iteration. It is safe to believe that Sony did not do the same mistake with the Vita.

One of the consequences is that without any hardware, it is difficult to understand the internals of the Vita, and that makes software hacks close to impossible. For software hacks to be even possible, we need to understand the internals of the vita. This is something that we’ve been discussing here, for those interested. Of course, there are software attempts at understanding the Vita better (Davee is probing the walls of the psp emulator, Dridri is investigating USB communications, SKFU is playing with the network, etc…)

Many of us have a few crashes that could be interesting on the Vita, but of course, a software crash is basically useless until we have the tools to analyze it, and possibly turn it into an exploit. For this, most likely, Hardware hackers will be required… but even that is not a given, since hardware on these devices is made more and more difficult to investigate. Everything can be hacked of course, it’s just a matter of time and money, but I am wondering if we are reaching a point where investigating such a device from a hardware point of view has become complex and expensive enough that a hobbyist tinkerer will not do it, only people/companies will do it, as an investment to future sales (I’m thinking for example of Datel, or, more recently, the whole usb dongle thing going on with the PS3).

What do you guys think? Has it become too expensive for an individual to investigate the hardware of new generation consoles?

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