PS Vita Hacker SKFU on Uncovering New Security Vulnerabilities

69w ago - Since reporting on his last flaw uncovered, PlayStation Vita hacker SKFU has found a few new vulnerabilities in Sony's PS Vita handheld gaming system.

To quote via wololo: Few hours ago, developer SKFU (known for his work on the PS3, but also recently for some investigations on the Vita security) posted a screenshot of his Vita showing some HTML in what is supposed to usually show official messages from Sony’s updates or packages.

Knowing SKFU's passion for everything network-related, I'm assuming he's doing some tests using some local DNS changes... or maybe he managed to put some of his own files in an official package? That would be exciting.

In previous tweets this week, he mentioned he found 2 potentially usable vulnerabilities on the Vita

VITA is back to life, since last tweet found 2 new possibile vulnerabilities. If it runs good, news in blog this evening!

That was, however, 2 days ago, and his blog wasn’t updated since then, so I’m assuming he ran into a few issues. (the “back to life” comment refers to the official 1.52 firmware which bricked his Vita…or appeared to do so... which turned out to be that the battery had to charge for almost 24 hours before the Vita accepting to turn on, for some reason)

Obviously lots of this experimentation will probably not lead to anything, but for now, every bit on info on the internals of the Vita is interesting. Let’s keep digging

Also from SKFU (linked above) is an update on the recent PlayStation Vita 1.52 Firmware status below, as follows:

Ok guys we tested the possibilities on firmware 1.52 for a few days now. What I can confirm is the following:

• Tech4's exploit still works
  
• Wololo's HBL still works
  
• Everything I research atm didn't change from 1.50 to 1.52
  

If that is fine for you, there's no reason not to update. Anyways, I have to mention that this can change without a firmware upgrade!

If you are online with your PS VITA, it can download and install silent updates for any application which runs in usermode and has nothing to do with system critical modules.

The good is, those updates are removed once the system is restored to the current firmware, so it would not be a major problem to remove a fix.

- SKFU