Recently, a Google engineer’s team helped Sony fix a security vulnerability in the PlayStation Portal. The Portal is a handheld device that facilitates online play, allowing users to stream games from their PlayStation 5 to the device via the Remote Play feature.
The original version of Portal could not store physical games and could only be played online. In February, a Google cloud security researcher named Andy Nguyen revealed that he had successfully cracked the Portal and played PSP games offline using an emulator.
However, on April 4, the Portal received a firmware update to version 2.06 containing a patch for the security vulnerability that Nguyen’s team had helped Sony identify.
Nguyen confirmed this on social network X and stated that they had responsibly reported the issue to PlayStation. Before joining Google, Nguyen had released PS Vita jailbreak tools and disclosed PS4 vulnerabilities.
Nguyen’s current role as a cloud security researcher at Google could be understood as intended to highlight how devices meant for online play can be exploited to run local software. Nevertheless, after the vulnerability was patched, some players criticized Nguyen’s decision to help Sony instead of making it public.
Nguyen explained that reporting the issue to Sony was the right thing to do, as making it public would have eventually led to Sony patching it.