Hacker News Reader

Comment by opello | Hacker News Reader

Is there any kind of technical write up of how this was accomplished? Looking at the Git history of the branch that introduced the plugin[1] was a bit rough, but I did find an interesting commit[2]. That commit looks like it patches some other code (apparently some pspnet_apctl.prx module)[3] but maybe all the discussion was in Discord and it's not been written up elsewhere?

It's probably unreasonable to ask for such details without delving into how PSP software images are structured and learning that ecosystem. Also maybe it's obvious for someone with a more low level understanding of the WPA 1 vs. 2 differences. But here I am unreasonably curious. :)

[1] https://github.com/PSP-Archive/ARK-4/commits/rev160/

[2] https://github.com/PSP-Archive/ARK-4/commit/edcc6f01618e3e45...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/PSP/comments/1igh5c9/wpa2_support/m...

View on HN

I'm far from an expert, but what is most likely is:

- The underlying firmware for the Marvell WiFi controller that Sony provided when they updated the PSP to support WPA (with AES) also supports WPA2 (with AES).

- Sony never set it up on the userspace side, perhaps for stability reasons or because there was no demand and they preferred playing it safe.

- The patches swap out the userspace bits to talk WPA AES with the ones for a WPA2 AES. The difference isn't huge, it's mostly changing data in some management frames and configuring the key exchange differently.

It's very impressive that that developer found the right things to patch, with the right values.

Looks like it has been in the works for a while.

https://psp-archive.github.io/apps/wpa2.html

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/04/4865-2/

I'm amazed it was so close all that time and hackers didnt turn it on back then. 20 years ago the internet was just coming into its own as a collaboration platform for large anonymous groups. I remember hackers set up a public website where you could annotate blocks of the PSP firmware as you reverse engineered it.

I remember the cat and mouse game with sony on the swaploit and eventually hacked firmare being released. I remember when the first psp dev kit was released on linux. I had a macbook but tried it bc it was just a huge shell script. Imagine my glee when, after 5 minutes of chunking spinning rust. I was able to compile code for the PSP! Then I remember the first time someone figured out how to send graphics commanda to its gpu and also how to change the cpu speed between 111/222/333 MHz.

I remember the first euro-style demo I saw by Alonetrio, which I modified to create PSPKick. Then came the first Atari 2600 emu and then then the first C64 emu. The spirit of collaboration was lively, jovial, fraternal, and celebratory!

Thanks for that perspective and detail, it makes a lot of sense. The first link also has some very nice establishing context for the environment. I'd still love to read the technical journey of the developer because I agree it is very impressive.

Yeah so basically the Marvell Libertas 88W8380 supports 802.11i (also known as WPA2) out of the box: https://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/hardware/Libertas_WLAN_cli...

The module patches the PSP kernel WPA module to make it use the native WPA2 capability of the chip/firmware instead of WPA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com