Last year, a friend gave me his SHIELD TV when he moved. He worked at NVIDIA and got it for free and had used it only a handful of times before it traveled from his closet to my own. I had forgotten about it until I had a need for a Raspberry Pi and discovered that they were all still sold out. Woul...

A few months ago, a contact reached out to me with an irresistible offer. I would be given the opportunity to experiment with an insanely rare, prototype development kit PlayStation Vita. The only ask from my source is that I somehow dump the boot code. I’ve spent the last seven years hacking every ...

For the past couple of months, I have been trying to extract the hardware keys from the PlayStation Vita. I wrote a paper describing the whole process with all the technical details, but I thought I would also write a more casual blog post about it as well. Consider this a companion piece to the pap...

This article was originally written 2019-01-11 and published on 2019-07-29 for the third anniversary of HENkaku, the first Vita jailbreak. It documents the work we did in early 2017, just days after the seminal “octopus” exploit. Although the work is dated and does not open any new doors, the techni...

I am not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I do want to do more technical writing this year. So here is a preprint of a paper I wrote on glitching the PS Vita as well as a simple model for reasoning about voltage glitches at a low level.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been developing an HDMI mod for the Vita on my free time. I thought it would be a fun project to practice my hardware design skills even though the end product would not be too useful (the VitaTV already exists). Unfortunately, this project did not end in success ...

A friend recently invited me to participate in Foobar, Google’s recruiting tool that lets you solve interesting (and sometimes not-so-interesting) programming problems. This particular problem, titled “Distract the Guards” was very fun to solve but I found no good write-ups about it online! Solution...

One thing I love about Vita hacking is the depth of it. After investing so much time reverse engineering the software and hardware, you think you would run out of things to hack. Each loose end leads to another month long project. This all started in the development of HENkaku Ensō. We wanted an eas...

When we (molecule) were reverse engineering the Vita’s firmware years ago, one of the first vulnerabilities we found was in the bootloader. It was a particularly attractive vulnerability because it was early in boot (before ASLR and some other security features are properly initialized) and because ...

Recently, I stumbled upon an old cable modem sitting next to the dumpster. An neighbor just moved out and they threw away boxes of old junk. I was excited because the modem is much better than the one I currently use and has fancy features like built in 5GHz WiFi and DOCSIS 3.0 support. When I calle...