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.
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
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