[Vita] NAND dumped!

[DinohScene]

Yifan Lu has successfully dumped the Vita NAND!
The NAND is roughly 3.7 GB big and 800 MB of it is encrypted.
This ofcourse doesn't concern pirates as it is useless as of now.
But maybe this will allow downgrading much like the 3DS allows.

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

Source: Max Console.

 

[Ryupower]

better source
http://wololo.net/2014/01/12/yifan-lu-dumps-the-vita-nand-confirms-its-encrypted/

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

better source
http://wololo.net/2014/01/12/yifan-lu-dumps-the-vita-nand-confirms-its-encrypted/

MaxConsole's post is just a copy-pasta of Wololo's, so no it's not really a "better" source.

As for the news, read about it the other day and...meh. Dumping the NAND is great and all, but I'm more curious to see what Yifan does next (holy shit, he learns quickly ._.)

 

[chavosaur]

I swear, I keep telling myself that j bought a Vita at the right time and More and more things keep happening to make that true.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I swear, I keep telling myself that j bought a Vita at the right time and More and more things keep happening to make that true.

Really this doesn't mean anything for Vita hacking. At the moment, there aren't any usable exploits for the Vita (AFAIK, IIRC Yifan found a usermode exploit in an old old firmware which would allow for Homebrew, but I haven't heard anything on that in a long time).

 

[DinohScene]

NAND dumping hardly ever leads to exploits.
It does however lead to the understanding of the files on the NAND + the decryption of such files (once decryptions keys are found) to build custom firmwares.

 

[Vengenceonu]

So on a Dark day of 3DS Hacking, The PSVita rises from the ashes. Typical.

 

[BORTZ]

Cool, but ultimately useless to the average peon.

 

[fojacko]

I swear, I keep telling myself that j bought a Vita at the right time and More and more things keep happening to make that true.

I bought a vita because of the Borderlands 2 and Minecraft announcements. I saw terraria was on the eshop after buying the vita and have sunk more than 24 hours into it (long amount of time for me). Also, upcoming indie games like OlliOlli are making me love my purchase even more, it looks pretty epic (if you didn't know, OlliOlli is best described as a hybrid of Canabalt and Tony Hawk's games.)

But really, a good portable version of minecraft (port of the console version, not the stripped down pocket edition) is enough to persuade minecraft fans to buy a vita, and face it, there isn't exactly a shortage of minecraft fans, is there?

I guess I should say the point of this post. What i'm trying to say is that this shouldn't be getting the average user excited, since if i have read it right, this hasn't lead to any homebrew progress.