Hacker CTurt, who’s been on the spotlight recently for confirming he has a PS4 Kernel exploit, has been making steady progress to make a PS4 Jailbreak possible. Today he announced he has a RAM Dump. Next step: patch the RAM. In other words, make the PS4 system do things it doesn’t really want to do, the first step to a PS4 Jailbreak*.

CTurt confirmed on twitter today that he was able to dump the PS4 RAM, through the kernel exploit that’s in his possession. His next step will be to selectively modify the RAM at runtime, a way to patch the PS4 software in order to make it do what it doesn’t want to do. From there, an SDK and a homebrew loader, or a Custom Firmware for the PS4 sound like the next appropriate targets.

Just broke WebKit process out of a FreeBSD jail (cred->cr_prison = &prison0). Guess you could say the PS4 is now officially “jailbroken” 😛

— CTurt (@CTurtE) December 12, 2015

Can successfully dump RAM from other processes (like SceShellUI) using ptrace! Next step: patching RAM… — CTurt (@CTurtE) December 12, 2015

Cturt has also promised he will do a technical writeup of how the exploit works in the near future.

PS4 Jailbreak possible for firmware 1.76 only?

The hack has already been confirmed by other hackers of the PS scene. Don’t get too excited too fast, though. first of all, these things take time (think months), and secondly, the exploit has been confirmed to work only up to firmware 1.76. If you remember, firmware 1.76 is where the webkit exploit had initially been discovered. If you’re a “normal” PS4 owner, your PS4 firmware is currently on version 3.11. There’s no going back to 1.76 for you.

Does that mean this will make the PS4 jailbreak possible for a handful of people running on 1.76 only? Not necessarily. As we’ve discussed before, this hack will let developers gather lots of critical information about the PS4 inner workings. As I’ve explained before, this will let them analyze the entire system, and possibly find more vulnerabilities, which might be still there on the latest 3.11 firmware. That being said, some people are already trying to get their hands on 1.76 PS4. Rumors say the Last of US PS4 Bundles are shipping with firmware 1.76, we haven’t verified this at this point.

Piracy & more speculation

For everyone looking forward to run unsigned code on their PS4, this is generally good news. For the white knights who fear for piracy, keep in mind that nothing at this point has been announced about breaking any form of encryption. Getting kernel access to a console usually means that the anti-piracy locks on the device can easily be removed, but nothing on that topic has been confirmed. If history repeats itself, the people breaking the initial security will not necessarily be the ones enabling piracy on the device.

Lots of speculation is going on for now, both from scene sites, and from mainstream sites that generally have no clue what they’re talking about. Keep in mind that nothing is ready at this point. Avoid fishy websites that pretend they have a PS4 Jailbreak possible for you. As we constantly try to remind you here, these sites make their money in general by having you fill surveys with the fake promise of a jailbreak download. If and when a PS4 jailbreak happens, this will be on the frontpage of trusted scene websites such as your very own wololo.net 😉

Stay tuned on our PS4 Jailbreak page for details.

* Bwaah, Wololo, only iOS devices can be called “jailbroken”, bwaah, I’m gonna complain in your comments section or on twitter, the world needs to know that you’re incorrectly using a word based on my own biased perception of that word’s meaning and recommended use. Bwaaah.