Hackers Appear to Partially Jailbreak Sony’s PlayStation 5

The hacking community has come up with a way to partially jailbreak Sony’s PlayStation 5, potentially paving the way for modders to reconfigure the console despite its restrictions. 

On Monday, a hacker named Specter published(Opens in a new window) the jailbreak, which can open access to the PS5’s kernel, the central component of the console’s operating system. The jailbreak leverages a vulnerability(Opens in a new window) in the PS5’s implementation of Webkit, the open-source browser engine best known for being used in Apple’s Safari. 

However, the jailbreak has major limitations. For one, it’s only stable about 30% of the time. It also can’t be used to run custom computer code on a PS5. So you won’t be able to install another operating system or run PC games.

“This exploit also cannot install any patches or hooks into kernel space, which means no homebrew-related code for the time being,” Specter wrote in the release notes. 

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Instead, the jailbreak can give you read/write capabilities to the PS5 console’s software. This includes access to a special debug mode in the system to tinker with the various settings. 

One modder named Lance McDonald showed(Opens in a new window) on Twitter that the debug mode provides access the PS5’s package installer. McDonald used the function to install a copy of the PS4 game PT(Opens in a new window), which was removed from the PlayStation Network in 2015. But in a follow-up tweet, he indicated the PS5 features a blacklist that’ll block the console from running old PS4 titles. 

“I need to work out how to destroy the blacklist/whitelist for PS4 games,” McDonald added(Opens in a new window).

Specter also said the limitations of the jailbreak means “it’s mostly intended for developers to play with to reverse engineer some parts of the system.” So it probably won’t be much of use to consumers. That said, insights from the jailbreak could help the modding community develop a more powerful jailbreak over time, eliminating restrictions on the console. 

Specter developed the jailbreak with the help of nine other contributors. For the jailbreak to work, the PS5 also needs to be running firmware version 4.03 or below (4.03 was released in October 2021).