Passcode

A passcode required to be chosen by the builder of a PS Vita, PS4 or PS5 PKG file. It must be 32 bytes long and should match [A-Za-z0-9\-_] regular expression.

Once this choice is made, the passcode is converted to a Keystone.

Generation

SCE provides in its official PS Vita, PS4 and PS5 SDKs a tool called pc2ks that converts a passcode to a keystone.

Verification

The official PS Vita/PS4/PS5 PKG tools requires the PKG passcode before letting the user verify or extract a PKG. However, what actually matters is the knowledge of the keystone.

For finalized PS Vita/PS4/PS5 PKG PKGs, the passcode is usually impossible to find altough some are weakly chosen and easily bruteforceable with a dictionary attack.

On TestKits/DevKits/internal PS Vita consoles, more functions are provided by the API to encrypt, verify and decrypt the Keystones.