It is that time of year again. Not Tempmas (though it is being blamed for being a bit slow with news this year) but the Chaos Community Congress, aka C3, this year being number 35 so 35C3. C3 is a European hacker conference that in years past has given rise to all sorts of interesting talks. As far as consoles and such things go this year has the Vita talk the title mentions and mostly that (sadly no breakdowns of older devices this time, the Wii, 3ds, xbox and xbox 360, Wii U, PS3, PS4, Switch, Amiga 500, gameboy and more having all had spots in years past), however there is bound to be plenty of other things the membership of this site will find of interest. As ever these are great places to learn some really in depth hacking skills, and some broad overviews of things from the perspectives of people that hack them. Of interest there is likely to be those talks on electronics protocols, programmable devices and rapid/low volume manufacture, for which this year (and previous years) have much to discuss, as well as those talks on the state of the world at large.

Do note it is a German group and run in Germany so there are several talks in German, however there are many more in English. Speaking of which the times listed on the schedule (aka fahrplan) are those for Germany so adjust accordingly.

Vita talk discussion on GBAtemp. event overview. or just the time then 16:10 local on the 29th of December.

35C3 wiki

Link to schedule/fahrplan detailing a list of speakers and talks, on the same link you will find a room and time option as well.

Finished events appear in short order on CCC's youtube channel, though for older years you might have to look at others (the links above being a good start). Things are streamed live via the streams page, and said streams can be downloaded if youtube (or downloading from it) is not your style.

What talks are you looking forward to this year? Are any of the returning speakers (or speakers you might have see at defcon, black hat and so forth) doing anything intriguing for you? Is anybody there in person this year?

 

[chrisrlink]

i think Chaos west maybe non english only maybe?

 

[raxadian]

Hack for patched Switches for gods sake

That exists but you can't run Switch games yet... as least in a non complicated way that has been released to the public.

And who cares if the Vita is dead? I still play PS1 games sometimes. And I have been playing Super Nintendo games on my old2DS.

Just because games don't get updates anymore it doesn't meant you can't have fun playing them.

 

[Jayro]

So is there anything post-worthy to write in the OP, or is it too soon? I'd like to see stuff as it comes, rather than wait for a highlights version when it's over.

 

[sj33]

The PS4 talk from M0rph3us1987 regarding the video apps has been hyped for a few weeks. Definitely looking forward to it, if any scene needs a boost it's that one.

 

[Valery0p]

Here the link to the ps4 live for anyone interested (-30 minutes to start
https://streaming.media.ccc.de/35c3/chaoswest

 

[alucard_xs]

No news ... Not good news ...

 

[gbatempfan1]

For people who missed it and do not want to wait for it to be processed, here is the relive link(raw) for the german PS4 talk:
https://streaming.media.ccc.de/35c3/relive/140 (Begins timestamp 00:16:06 ends 00:47:51)

It will usually appear in the next 12-24 hours over in https://media.ccc.de/c/35c3 with slides, and likely with english audio tracks and other languages if available.

 

[Subtle Demise]

The Windows kernel hacking talk disappeared. Thankfully, wayback caught it. Now we can speculate *why* it disappeared.

I think the consequences of that might be more detrimental than a game system exploit, but I mean exposing it would get it patched very quickly, even more so if it was already disclosed to Microsoft. So it is still pretty disappointing that it won't he talked about.

 

[slaphappygamer]

davee is the one who "recently" release the infinity cfw for the psp and will be talking about the vita. ive got high hopes that vita cfw or adrenaline get improved. the psp and vita are my favorite handhelds.

 

[sj33]

Serious question, what more are people actually wanting from the Vita? Coldboot on 3.69?

 

[FAST6191]

Serious question, what more are people actually wanting from the Vita? Coldboot on 3.69?

It is nice to have full hardware access, easy install, coldboot (or at the very least instant easy launch) on end of life consoles and all revisions thereof.

 

[kuwanger]

I think the consequences of that might be more detrimental than a game system exploit, but I mean exposing it would get it patched very quickly, even more so if it was already disclosed to Microsoft. So it is still pretty disappointing that it won't he talked about.

It's unclear from the description, but it sounds like what was to be discussed wasn't an exploit itself but merely a vector to try to circumvent mitigation. Given that MS has from at least Windows 7 been hardening kernel heap/pool/whatever memory space and still there are vectors of circumvention, my guess is that while the specific circumvention mitigation could be patched out that there'd still be other similar vectors of attack. I'm reminded of how Nintendo took several firmware releases to adequately protect memchunk headers. Or the Windows Shatter attack that was mitigated in Windows Vista.

Having said that, yea I'm rather disappointed too. I wouldn't presume the consequences were more detrimental than a game system exploit. Windows should already be sufficiently hardened that remote exploits of any sort shouldn't be possible, and physical access exploits are in the same realm of game system exploit risk. I wish at least some explanation was offered so we weren't left to speculation.

 

[Billy Acuña]

No WiiU love, nothing to see here...

 

[bomigoton]

Serious question, what more are people actually wanting from the Vita? Coldboot on 3.69?

smells like cold boot for everybody, also in the future.

 

[smf]

smells like cold boot for everybody, also in the future.

The talk is outstandingly vague about what discovering the bootloader decryption key actually gives you.

I don't know whether they are just bad at talks, whether they want to build hype or whether having the bootloader decryption key is essentially useless.

 

[kuwanger]

My guess is that it's pretty useless. It sounds like the bootloader itself is too small to exploit and there's many layers of protection that make injection hard. So, even if you have the master key and derived keys, you may have no means to inject an app (I presume Sony is signing stuff with public/private keys)--at least, not without possibly some soldering and rewritting the eMMC and that still might need some actual exploit? I do agree it's just rather vague, except in that they do spell out someone is porting Linux to the thing, but that sounds like something doable on the ARM regardless of whether F00D was hacked or not.

I'm not expert in any way, though, especially on the Vita. And I could totally have misunderstood parts of the talk, so definitely don't quote me on anything. I just know that having certain keys on some devices are useless if the point is arbitrary execution and there's no way to use said keys to sign/encrypt things and inject your own code. That's why I always listen for them talking about execution and not just per se keys.

 

[Jayro]

davee is the one who "recently" release the infinity cfw for the psp and will be talking about the vita. ive got high hopes that vita cfw or adrenaline get improved. the psp and vita are my favorite handhelds.

New PSP CFW? I'm down.

 

[slaphappygamer]

New PSP CFW? I'm down.

This is what I was talking about.

 

[Jayro]

This is what I was talking about.

Oh. Well that's disappointing... Sticking to PRO CFW then...

 

[bomigoton]

The talk is outstandingly vague about what discovering the bootloader decryption key actually gives you.

I don't know whether they are just bad at talks, whether they want to build hype or whether having the bootloader decryption key is essentially useless.

https://twitter.com/theflow0/status/1079441207359668224?s=19

A new hack anounced. Lets see what we get.