Hackers who got PS Portal to run PSP games offline helped Sony to patch out the exploit

03.04.2024 - 12:45 / videogameschronicle.com / Chris Scullion

A Google engineer who helped to hack the PlayStation Portal to run PSP games offline says his team has now helped Sony to fix the exploit.

The Portal is a streaming-only device which is designed to let players stream their PS5 console to the handheld via Remote Play so they can be played away from the TV.

As such, the stock version of the hardware offers no options to save physical games, offering streaming functionality and nothing else.

However, in February,  Google cloud vulnerability researcher Andy Nguyen revealed that he and a small team of other Google engineers had managed to hack the device to play games locally, running a PSP emulator natively offline.

On Monday the PlayStation Portal received a new firmware update to version 2.06, and Nguyen later confirmed on X that it contained a fix for the hack, one his team had helped Sony to identify.

“We responsibly reported the issues to PlayStation,” Nguyen wrote. “Bugs are fixed on 2.06.”

Before he joined Google, Nguyen had previously released PS Vita jailbreaks and explosed PS4 vulnerabilities. However, at the time of the Portal hack’s original announcement, Nguyen made it clear that his team had no intention to release its details to the public.

Indeed, given his current role at Google as a cloud vulnerability researcher, it appeared clear that Nguyen’s hack was simply designed to highlight the way seemingly streaming-only devices can still be exploited to run software locally.

Following his latest update, Nguyen has been met with criticism by some players who want to know why he helped Sony to fix the exploit instead of giving it to the public.

He explained that had he released the exploit publicly, Sony would have eventually fixed it anyway, and that reporting it was the right thing to do.

“No idea why you folks cry about the disclosure,” he wrote. “If we just released to the public, do you think Sony would just leave it unpatched? Reporting vs not reporting is only a few weeks of difference.”