For PSVita hacking, 2018 ended with a bang thanks to Team Molecule’s revelations at 35C3 and this brought about a new era of Vita hacking, an era in which every security measure could be bypassed. Thanks to this, the memory card authentication routine has been busted and PSM Dev apps have been decrypted; and for further good news, TheFlow stated that he plans to release a hack for FW 3.69 this year!

On a more technical front, the last few days brought us some interesting developments with the recently released decryption tools (and information) from Team Molecule.
One of these developments is that Xerpi was able to reverse engineer the F00D module that does memory card authentication, with help from motoharu who did most crypto reverse engineering. The reason why it’s relevant to regular end-users is that, with this information, it is now possible to create USB PSVita memory card readers for use with PCs. The main advantage of this is that you could easily copy data to/from multiple memory cards if and that if your PSVita dies, you can still extract Another interesting development is that now, all applications ever released for the PSVita can be decrypted. Thanks to this, CelesteBlue and SilicaAndPina have been decrypting older applications that Sony stopped supporting some time ago.

Among decrypted applications, we can find:


your own data from it. As of right now, there are no memory card readers available but Xerpi hopes that some manufacturing firm will start producing them on the cheap. To get more information, check out Xerpi’s recent commits to this GitHub branch. promises hack for FW 3.69 this year

Last October, TheFlow mentioned having a second exploit chain for the PSVita that could achieve HENKaku on FW 3.69.
While this is good news, it doesn’t mean that you should go update your PSVita console to FW 3.69 right now as nothing has been released of now. Furthermore, FW 3.69 doesn’t grant you any extra abilities as FW 3.69 games are playable on lower FWs thanks to compatibility packs so there’s nothing to gain by being on the latest FW.
As always, you shouldn’t nag TheFlow about a release date on Twitter (as he’d most likely just block you, which you’d deserve) and wait for further news on the matter before updating your Vita/PSTV.
Memory Card authentication routine busted and PSM Dev Apps decrypted