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Patching Flipnote Studio's Online Services

Daniel Wilkinson edited this page Oct 29, 2018 · 6 revisions

Overview

Over the years, using a proxy has been the main method of connecting to unsecured Flipnote Hatena clone services (such as Sudomemo, Freenote, and Ugonote just to name a few). However, on January 17th(?), 2018, the authentication endpoint of Flipnote Hatena was shutdown permanently following the closing of various other Nintendo services. The only known Flipnote Hatena clone that utilized a work-around was Sudomemo, which used proxy authentication to verify a connecting user and based session tokens on the proxy session. Soon following on April 2nd, 2018, NAS (Nintendo Authentication Server) connections from Flipnote Studio (and Flipnote Studio 3D) were shutdown, preventing even proxy authentication from working.

Following these services shutting down, no users could access any Flipnote Hatena clones without special patching of their Flipnote Studio application. Sudomemo (status as of 10/29/2018: maintenance) took the route of developing Sudopatch, which is still in development status and not yet ready for public consumption. IPGFlip (status as of 10/29/2018: online, public beta) took the route of developing FlipnotePatcher, which is available in source code format and ready for usage with unsecured Flipnote Hatena clone services. Both of these services are or will be compatible with nds-constrain't.

Below, we at Flipnote Collective aim to provide instructions on utilizing nds-constrain't, FlipnotePatcher and Sudopatch, along with other alternative patching methods as they come.


nds-constrain't is an exploit taking advantage of a critical flaw in Nintendo's SSL libraries in order to use a certificate the DS sees as signed by Nintendo (more information can be found in the README). This can be used along with a DNS server to create a trusted certificate for nas.nintendowifi.net (the Nintendo authentication server) and flipnote.hatena.com, allowing any unmodified Nintendo DSi to connect to a replacement server, with the capability to authenticate using the official process.

FlipnotePatcher (based on the WfcPatcher project) has been released by InvoxiPlayGames and is confirmed working by various members of the Flipnote Collective and deemed safe to use. It sports one-time patching of Flipnote Hatena connection URLs and Nintendo WFC URLs in a given Flipnote Studio SRL and requires a CFW with signature patches on the target DSi system. It also includes the ability to specify which URLs to replace the default ones with, defaulting to IPGFlip for Flipnote Hatena and Wiimmfi for Nintendo WFC.

You can find instructions on how to use FlipnotePatcher in this GitLab snippet.

Sudopatch

Sudopatch has been discontinued after a short private beta, due to being replaced by a newer method. It intended to be a just-in-time patcher that is executed from within Flipnote Studio itself using the same exploitation methods as ugopwn. It should sport patching Flipnote Hatena connection URLs and replace the SSL certificates embedded in Flipnote Studio's ARM9 binary.