Hackers have been circling the PS5 for almost a yearand it seems they finally managed to jailbreak the 2020 hardware with a new kernel-level exploit first spotted on the PS4. While it does not provide access to run certain types of code, the exploit reportedly allowed at least one person to run Kojima’s Silent Hill demo prequel. pton their PS5, and will likely have a massive impact as more people explore jailbreak.
That PS5 IPV6 kernel exploitdiscovered by “PlayStation hacking god” Andy “TheFloW” Nguyen last month, now has a way to implement it tweeted over the weekend by Hacker Specter Dev. It relies on a previously known vulnerability in Webkit, the PS5’s web browsing technology, which works on PS5s running firmware 4.03 and possibly earlier versions.
The exploit works by having the PS5 access a web server located on a local PC containing the SpecterDev implementation of the hack. It appears to work about 30 percent of the time, giving users access to the console’s debug mode, allowing them to run software outside of what Sony originally intended.
Here’s a demonstration of the new exploit that was tweeted yesterday:
“This exploit gives us read/write access but no execution,” he reports Console hacking blog Wololo.net. “This means that at the moment there is no way to load and run binaries, everything is constrained within the framework of the ROP chain. However, the current implementation allows debug settings.”
Even so, the early exploit was still enough to let go Dark Souls Archaeologist Lance McDonald installs a discontinued PS4 micro-horror game ptwhich is not officially backward compatible on the PS5:
The IPV6 webkit exploit was discovered by TheFloW on PS4 two years ago. He found it back on the PS5 and reported it to Sony in January 2022. “It seems like their patch was somehow undone when migrating from FreeBSD9 to FreeBSD11,” he recently told motherboard. TheFloW subsequently received a $10,000 bounty from Sony and the Vulnerability has been disclosed on the HackerOne page on September 20, 2021.
Since then, others in the PlayStation hacking community have been working on ways to exploit the vulnerability to jailbreak both the disc-based PS5 and its all-digital counterpart. Console makers are attempting to partially lock down their systems to ward off piracy, and today’s jailbreak is likely just the beginning of hackers poking holes in that security. Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
