PSN Store DRM Has Been Cracked

As always with crack and hack news, take this one with the proverbial grain of salt. Several sites from the "underground" of the Internet have begun reporting about the fact that the Digital Rights Management on the PlayStation Store titles that are exclusive to the PlayStation Portable has been cracked by some well versed crackers.

The source is a French speaking site that hosts homebrew developers CipherUpdate and Kono. They claim to have put together a program that can break the PSN store's DRM on PSP titles, such as fl0w and Beats. Previously, Sony has said that there's no chance their DRM on those PSP exclusive titles can be broken. It seems like NP Decryptor can do it.

The creators claim that only PSP titles can be cracked using their program. They say: "This is a psp homebrew to decrypt psp games bought from the Playstation Network Store. Only those that are real psp games, not psone, can be decrypted with this tool. Only psp that can play the game can decrypt it. After decryption it can be played on whatever psp running a CFW. This homebrew has only been tested in 3.90, we don't know if can work on other CFW."

We're talking about the underground here, so verification on these claims is hard to come by. Although the developers of NP Decryptor describe the crack process in some detail, using such technical terms as "EBOOT.PBP" and "NP.PBP" until a few people try out the program, details will be sketchy at best.

If all this proves to be real and NP Decryptor really works in creating working cracked copies of the PlayStation Portable exclusive games bought from the PlayStation Store, then this is an important move in the piracy vs. console battle. Maybe the best indicator of whether the crack system is working or not is Sony's reaction to all this.

As more details appear we'll be sure to make them available.