Editing Pandora

[[JigKick Battery]] and [[Magic Memory Stick]] allow loading [[IPL]] from [[Memory Stick]] instead of NAND, which is useful for unbricking. But the [[IPL]] still has to be encrypted and signed to be accepted by the [[iplloader]]. This was first solved by Bruteforce attack (?2005? ?2007?). Then in 2011 [[KIRK Crypto Engine]] command 1 key got retrieved thanks to PS3 hack, and allowed properly encrypting and signing IPL, as demonstrated by mathieulh in 2018.

See [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attachments/1040_psphacking.odp 24C3 Talk by Tyranid (2007)]. [http://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/SilverSpring_Blog/my.malloc.us/silverspring/pandora-exploit/index.html iplloader exploit writeup by SilverSpring]

The fake encrypted data is bruteforced to decrypt into your chosen data (to be able to exploit the [[iplloader]]). And the signature for your fake encrypted data is bruteforced again to make it appear valid in the eyes of the crypto engine so that it will will go ahead and decrypt your fake encrypted data.

The [[iplloader]] exploit works like this:

iplloader pseudocode for loading and decrypting the IPL:

As the iplloader loads the first IPL block (the fake one), it decrypts the block in-place, ie. the decrypted block just overwrites your encrypted block. The fake block only decrypts into four bytes of all 0's so it ends up only overwriting the first four bytes of your fake block (with four 0's) after decryption.

After decryption, the iplloader thinks the data is now a decrypted IPL block.

* IPL Block for Prototype (0.4 and 0.6) iplloader, containing the following MIPS assembly instructions (the jal instruction is not used because of the address length, instead the address is stored to a register using the load immediate instruction, then the jump register instruction is used to jump to it, assembly is used to artificially make the jump because older IPL blocks cannot contain an entrypoint value, the old iplloader instead jumps to 0x88400000 as an hardcoded entrypoint address):

This block will jump to 0xBFE01100 so you can use this block as if you were using a Pandora IPL block on the prototype iplloader, which saves you time from encrypting new IPLs every time you need to test a new build.

Note: There is no 0xBFC00100 IPL block for the prototype iplloader because they do not load IPL blocks there and you cannot use that address as it would overwrite the iplloader code itself which does not use a payload section/address and runs entirely from 0xBFC00000.

* IPL Block for 0.7.0 and later (up to 2.7.1) iplloader, containing the previously mentioned jr MIPS assembly instruction to address 0xBFE01100  

The 0xBFD00100 version of these blocks work as-is by replacing the time attacked forged block with the properly encrypted ones supplied. The 0xBFE01100 and 0xBFCD00100 version (which only works on Development Tool units), may require you to rebuild/recompile your custom IPLs using 0xBFE01100 or 0xBFCD00100 as the entrypoints respectively, as well as using a modified iplboot because the one used by retail custom IPLs uses iplloader hardcoded addresses. It may be wiser to rebuild it as a fully valid IPL instead using ipltool [https://github.com/zecoxao/ipltool], although using the Pandora compatible IPL block instead would allow you to port retail custom IPL projects on devkit with minimal efforts.

Keep in mind that under normal circumstances neither the Memory Stick nor the NAND devices are initialized by the DTP-T1000 iplloader. Reading or writing to and from either of these devices will require you to add the initialization routine to your IPL (most likely within your iplboot binary).