Cobra Black Fin dongle announces the beginning of Piracy on the PS Vita for December

Well… as much as I hate proprietary dongles, I must say this is some interesting piece of news.

A new website was recently created, announcing the arrival of the Cobra Black Fin, a dongle to play isos on the PS Vita.

What’s intriguing about the Black fin is how it’s going to work: the Black Fin relies on p2p sharing of the games in order to work. In order to play a specific iso, you’ll need someone, somewhere, to have the original game cartridge inserted into the “Black Fin reader” connected to their PC. It probably does not matter who that person is, or where they are, what matters is that when you attempt to play an iso, the PS Vita will try to authenticate the cartridge, which will trigger a signal on the black fin card (inserted into your vita) to look for an original cartridge somewhere on its network (the cartridge connected to some guy’s PC), and communicate with that original cartridge for authentication. One’ll still need the iso on their SD card, and the original cartridge will only need be needed for the authentication steps, I assume.

According to their marketing description, this is so that you can share games with your restricted circle of friends. Practically, I’m convinced their global p2p network will ensure you can play whatever game is on the network, and everyone on the net will be “your friend”.

Like it or not, it sounds like a very clever and out-of-the-box idea. From a technical perspective, this is brilliant.

From a usefulness perspective, however, it assumes people will play nice and share games on their end. Maybe the Cobra Black Fin network will work a bit like torrents, letting you play games only if you share some of yours. There’s also the risk this could die if it does not gather momentum: if many people buy and use the product, Black Fin have built themselves a huge network of p2p piracy. But if only a few hundred people get it, it will die as soon as it appeared.

Long term too, this is most likely not a viable product: as less people use it, less and less games will be available on the network.

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Nevertheless, from the technical approach, I can’t help but think this is a pretty brilliant idea. Nobody likes DRM piracy dongles, but you have to admit the idea is ingenious. How does the black fin card contact its p2p network in the first place? That assumes they have ways to run some level of unsigned code, and I’d be interested to understand how this works.

Such a system makes the Vita 3G much more interesting for pirates, all of a sudden. You’ll need network access in order to play the isos.

We’ve known for a while that hackers know how to dump vita cartridges (therefore acquiring the isos will probably not be a problem for people using that system) and how to run the isos, with some limitations. It is possible this dongle announcement will force some hackers out of the woods, to provide the scene with free piracy mechanisms, just like we’ve seen on the 3DS scene.

We have yet to confirm if this is true or some advanced hoax, but it does look legit. The dongle is announced to hit retailers by the end of the month.

The Full Press release:

The Black Fin allows Vita and Vita Slim Wifi and 3G users to share their Vita games over the internet.

The Cobra Black Fin Emulator card stores game ISO’s on Micro SD and the Black Fin Card is then inserted into the Vita/Vita Slim console

When connected to the Black Fin servers authentication of the Vita game is performed by matching the ISO on your Micro SD card to the same original game running on a peers’ Black Fin reader connected to his PC and the Black Fin servers or friends’  servers.

You might ask why it is necessary to authenticate the game you wish to play using an original card connected to a server?

Vita has a very secure card authentication mechanism, which to date has not been penetrated and is based on secure cryptography. It is unlikely that a direct authentication method which avoids having to use a peer to peer system will appear any time soon. As a result Cobra has designed a unique and cutting edge peer to peer sharing device which allows users to share their favourite games with friends over  an internet network.

Vast resources have been poured into designing a flash card which is the same size as the original Vita card itself. Yes, the Cobra Black Fin squeezes all of its technology into a card no bigger than a Vita game card with tons of features and packing serious hardware power! When you look at the circuit board design and components used you start to understand the expertise and time required to pull off a design of this magnitude.

Expect release of the Cobra BlackFin end of December 2015..

Resellers can reserve their stocks in advance by e-mailing: sales@cobra-blackfin.com

Initial batch is sure to sell out fast, so be sure to reserve your stocks in advance to avoid disappointment.

Stay tuned for more information and further picture and video presentations.

Source: Cobra Black Fin, via PlaystationHax

Yifan Lu’s hardware fundraiser: the scene donation drive that reached its goal in less than 24h

You might have seen YifanLu’s hardware fundraiser on our forums. Yesterday, the famous Vita hacker who gave us native vita homebrew just asked for the community’s help.

His goal: understand the Vita’s security processor in depth.

Although YifanLu couldn’t give too many details on what he’ll use the money for, he explained he needed $1400 to secure a deal with some legit entity that could provide us additional information about the Vita CPU.

Without sharing too many details, I need to emphasize that Yifanlu has insisted on the fact that this approach could lead to nowhere, for many reasons. The seller could decide to not proceed with the deal, or the information we gather could end up being useless for decrypting anything related to the Vita. from what I gathered, there are more reasons this could fail than succeed.

Yeah, those of you who pay attention to detail will know this isn’t a Vita CPU ;)

From YifanLu’s post:

•  This deal is 100% legal. It is not in the black or gray market. We are not paying a bribe or blackmail or anything shady. The money is not going to Sony (we’re not buying a devkit or registering to be a developer). We are not buying potentially stolen parts from Foxconn factories. Everything is completely clean, or I wouldn’t even be considering it.
• The intentional vagueness comes from the fact that this approach of information gathering (as far as I know) has never been attempted before. If Sony finds out, they might find a way to stop the deal. If the other party sees this as something controversial, they will likely back out to avoid any trouble/press.
• EVEN if I get all the money, they might still back out of the deal. In that case, I will refund everyone in full.
• EVEN if the deal goes through, the information we gather from it may be useless. In that case, we would lose the bet, and the money is gone.
• If the information does turn out to be helpful; because of the sensitive nature of it, we will share it with a small group of vita hackers for the time being. However, I promise that no later than a year from now, any information we get not subject to NDA will be released.

What’s interesting here is how fast YifanLu was able to gather the $1400 from our community. Within less than 24h, the goal was reached. Apparently some big donator has been lurking on the Vita scene  It also shows that YifanLu has given enough to the scene that we know we can trust him with this kind of thing.

Although there is absolutely no guarantee at this point that this could lead to anything useful, this is overall good news for the scene, let’s see what happens next!

Xmax Katsu teases a Hybrid Firmware for the PS Vita?!

Xmax Katsu is currently teasing something that he calls a ‘Hybrid Firmware’ (HFW).

The term hybrid Firmware must not be confused with a proper Custom Firmware, but what is an HFW?

If we go back to the PSP, then we will see that hybrid firmwares used to be around a few years ago. The older 3.xx OE CFWs have been hybrid (custom) firmwares, since they were based on firmware 1.50, but had an additional 3.xx custom firmware kernel.

As of firmware 3.70, the first ‘universal’ PSP firmware that supported not only the old PSP 1000, but also the (then) newer PSP 2000, this got swapped and the 3.70 had been the base firmware, while an additional, optional 1.5 kernel add-on was available for PSP 1000 users. All future (4.xx, 5.xx, 6.xx) CFWs are following this latter concept (at least so far).

Back to the Playstation Vita. While the PSP had full kernel access, this is not available on the PS Vita. A hybrid Firmware is (apparently) nonetheless possible, and can kinda be described as having different parts of different official firmwares on the PS Vita.

For example the device identifies as (an attack helicopter… Nah, just kidding) firmware 3.51/3.52, but has a base firmware of 3.18, and core parts of firmware 3.36.

This would enable one to visit the Playstation Store, play games that ‘require’ a higher firmware (unless those requirement claims are legit – then it won’t work until you run the proper requirement firmware), but also be able to use exploits & software that was created for lower firmwares (e.g. the 3.18 or 3.36 one).

Such a HFW would be the perfect kind of official firmware, even though it still doesn’t have kernel access. It would retain the so far achieved hacking methods, while also allowing someone to enjoy the ‘new and exciting features‘ that a newer Firmware would offer.

Regardless of OFW or HFW, you still won’t be able what a proper CFW would offer you: Kernel access.

An HFW would just allow you to kinda >em>”merge” two different OFWs into one, which then lets you use the currently available hacking stuff for older firmware, while the device itself & the Sony servers think it is running the higher version.

Before you guys are asking for a download link & tutorial, keep in mind that this still involved a hardware modification, which is something 95% of the people are not willing to do (themselves).

An easy one-click software solution is not yet available, and will most likely not be available for a few years.

PS Vita Hack: Yifan Lu announces “Rejuvenate” – A platform for native PS Vita Homebrews!

Despite not getting a space on Sony’s E3 lineup, Yifan Lu decided to announce a PS Vita hack: the Rejuvenate platform for the PS Vita on his very own blog.

But what is Rejuvenate? Well…

PS Vita Hack – What is Rejuvenate?

Summarized: A way to have native PS Vita homebrews on your portable (No PS VitaTV support) Playstation Vita handheld!

The Rejuvenate ps vita hack does NOT enable any kind of PS Vita piracy, even if Yifan Lu wished to, he cannot, due to limitations preventing piracy on the vita itself.

Yifan Lu bypassed a few limitations that Sony has added to the PSM programme, which in the end made it possible for him to enable native Homebrews for the PS Vita through this hack.

Like he has said in the past few weeks, the PSM Dev application is necessary and you have to have the PSM SDK installed (on your computer). If you lack these things, you cannot use Rejuvenate. Yifan Lu says he expects Sony to remove the PSM Dev App from the PSN Store any time now, so get it while you still can.

If you are a fan of numbers, then keep in mind that the PSP 2000+ (non-1000) has 64MB of shared memory, runs at 333MHz (CPU) and 166Mhz (GPU), while the PS Vita has 512MB of memory (main), 128MB of (video) RAM and four CPU’s running at approx. 1GHz each!

If the PSP could provide cool homebrews with its weak hardware, then just think of what the PS Vita, and its great hardware, could be capable of?!

Heavy modifications in terms of installing an alternative OS, major (or minor) system modifications or kernel access is not possible with Rejuvenate.

If you want to know more about Yifan Lu’s upcoming platform release, then head over to his blog. He is explaining a lot of things regarding Rejuvenate, including the upcoming release schedule, as well as limitations. Cheers for this PS Vita hack!

Source via Yifan Lu.