Hoewel er voor de PlayStation Vita leuke exploits zijn om Homebrew als Emulatoren te draaien, is het voor sommige hackers de heilige graal om de console 100% te kraken en daarna .iso "backups" (lees gratis games) te draaien. Nu is zijn hier diverse methodes voor, zoals het dumpen en analyseren van de Nand. Yifan Lu is hier nu in geslaagd, maar vond ook dat er 800mb aan encrypted bestanden zijn die weer hun eigen keys hebben. Hoe je het went of keert Sony heeft deze handheld goed dicht getimmerd, maar we weten allemaal dat het een kwestie van tijd is voor dat deze handheld valt.

I've mentioned a few weeks ago Yifan Lu's ongoing experiment/attempt at looking at the vita's hardware. Yifan's been busy over the Christmas period, looking at the bowels of our favorite portable console. Earlier today he announced he was able to dump the Vita's NAND. Now before everyone gets excited for no good reason, all this really gives us today is confirmation that the vita onboard memory is encrypted. This in itself is interesting though, as this confirms Sony didn't mess up their security on that point, and attempting to hack the Vita by modifying the NAND directly is not a possibility.

Yifan also shared a bunch of cool pictures and explanations on how he achieved the dump, something that I think is extremely valuable for all of us, especially those interested to know how hardware hacking works. As I've stated many times now, I believe Vita hacking will not come without massive help from hardware hackers.

Some of Yifan Lu's interesting findings are that the eMMC NAND is about 3.78GB, with about 800MB used by the (encrypted) system, and the remaining 3GB or so potentially empty for now.

This experiment gave Yifan Lu new cool hardware skills that he'll use to look at more stuff in the Vita's internals. He also details the hardware cost of this experiment, something you'll find interesting if you want to do something similar one day :)

Oh, and this goes without saying, but yifan Lu will not publicly disclose the dumped material. Not that it would be useful anyway, given that it's encrypted.

This might sound like a disappointment, but to me, the fact that one guy went from no hardware knowledge to being able to dump the NAND of the Vita in a matter of weeks is extremely exciting. Again, more important than the result is how he achieved it, a process that he details on his blog. I wish I had the time to do the same :)