PSP World

Can the PSP Go! Be Hacked?

Credible leaks from within the video game industry have alerted us to the existence of Sony's upcoming hardware revision, the PSP Go! What we don't yet know is how well this new device will be able to hold up against the onslaught of hackers, or whether, like the PSP 3000, homebrew enthusiasts will be unable to have their way with it. So far, Sony has been very successful at reducing the amount of piracy on their device and locking hackers out of new versions of its hardware.

Unlike Sony's currently bulletproof PSP 3000 design, however, there are a lot of factors working in favor of the hackers who might attack the PSP Go!. First of all, the device is about as radical a redesign as one could imagine for the PSP lineup. It repackages the oblong PSP as a smaller, more svelte handheld device - one that truly might be able to fit in our pockets. In order to achieve this comfortable size, Sony has had to sacrifice the UMD drive, long a bulwark of the PSP design. As a result, there are many potentially new areas that hackers could explore to open up the system. For example, the on-board flash memory and downloadable business model offer more vectors of infiltration for homebrew hackers.

UMD disks proved relatively easy to crack and dump onto memory stick, so the move to a digital distribution model doesn't necessarily present a new security flaw. The problem is what Sony decides to do about all of those UMDs already in circulation at retail. If the company devises a new method of authenticating and crediting customers for old UMD games and allowing them to download those titles to their PSP Go!, this could present a new security weakness. What happens if hackers find a way to generate UMD product codes or trick kiosks into allowing them to download free copies of old UMD games? What if hackers found a way to reproduce the download and installation process for new games, effectively bypassing the PSN store altogether? Whatever Sony decides to do to appease fans of the UMD format, it will have to act with one eye on security.

Artist's rendition of what the rumored PSP Go! might actually look like.

Another potential weakness with the new hardware remains the firmware that will run the core applications on the machine. While we've heard a lot about the PSP Go! hardware specs, we have not heard as much about the software that will power the device. That is because Sony is likely to use the same firmware family that currently powers the regular PSP (albeit with some changes). This could make life easier for homebrew hackers, since they are already intimately familiar with the inner workings of Sony's official firmware. A number of known exploits such as the buffer overflow, Tiff image and savegame exploits that enabled software hacking of the PSP-1000 might resurface on the newly-released hardware. Furthermore, differences in the file structure between PSP Go! firmware and that used on older models can be compared to identify potential security weaknesses.

There is good news for Sony: The PSP 3000, which contains hardware security on the motherboard, has valiantly resisted the intrusions of hackers for more than a year. That shows the company has learned from its earlier mistakes and has found some cutting-edge strategies that work against even the most determined reverse engineers. Another potential boon is that one old attack vector - the "Pandora" battery exploit, will probably disappear with this revision. Sony is likely to use a smaller and more advanced battery technology in the PSP Go! and service mode activation may not even be accomplished via the battery with the new hardware revision.

Despite Sony's best efforts to combat piracy, the future is still uncertain for its PSP Go! hardware. One potential place to look for guidance is Apple's iPhone platform. What many people don't know is that the device is easily hacked, and piracy of App Store products is actually a major, unreported problem. What keeps most mainstream users honest is the fact that Jailbroken phones cannot benefit from all of the many official features of the device, suggesting that an effective panacea to piracy is providing a streamlined, killer online ecosystem that users are willing to pay for.