new VHBL exploit by Acid_Snake

via http://wololo.net/2012/07/24/a-new-v...by-acid_snake/


This week, /talk member Acid_Snake (creator of pyMenu for VHBL) managed to get VHBL to run on his exploit on the US and EU versions of an undisclosed PSP Game (TheCobra’s latest addition to VHBL helped us in getting the EU version to run by the way).



Acid_Snake has already done some early testing, and homebrew compatibility is fairly good, although, as usual, a few “big” homebrews such as ScummVM or snes9xTYL are missing the fun. (See details in Acid_Snake’s thread)

If you’ve been counting, that’s now the 4th undisclosed VHBL port available:

Some of you might think that’s enough for us to do one release before 1.80, but as far as I know for now there is no change of plans: the next VHBL release, based on neur0n’s exploit, will happen after firmware 1.80 is released.

As a few people mentioned in the blog comments, yes, there is a risk Sony majorly patches VHBL in 1.80, like this risk existed in 1.61, 1.65, 1.67, and 1.69. However so far their strategy has been to remove the games from the store as fast as possible, patch the firmware, then put the game back on store once the firmware is updated. I believe this is a cost-effective way to mitigate the impact of VHBL and I am not sure they will change their strategy for now (anyway they should really be focusing on the Vita side rather than the psp side IMO). The risk is here, but we are taking it, as we assume it is more costly for Sony to “strongly” patch VHBL, than to let us play homebrews with VHBL once in a while.

So what will happen with these 4 ports of VHBL? I don’t know yet, this will depend what their owners want to do with it, but for now we’d rather assume they’ll all be useful sometime in the future.

Speaking of the amount of exploits, I counted again today, and I am now aware of 16 exploitable games on the psp that haven’t been disclosed yet. Some of these games are not available on the vita, and some of these games cannot host a port of VHBL (or at least, not one that would work in a satisfactory way), but some of them haven’t been fully tested yet.

Also, if you add the amount of games that have been exploited in the past on the psp, brings the total to about 30 psp games found to be exploitable so far with simple buffer overflows. As jigsaw mentioned a while ago, I would not be surprised if most psp games are exploitable one way or another through savegame hacks, given enough time…

•Related read: 10 Great PSP Games with a vulnerability, anyway, the number of exploitable games found so far is just a funny anecdote I wanted to share.