The PS5 has been officially out for a few days only, and a lot of people have been having a hard time getting their hands on one due to limited inventory across retailers.

But the hacking scene is already looking into ways to hack the PS5.

So far of course nothing groundbreaking has been revealed or released, but here’s a pretty good summary of what has been happening since the PS5 launched.

PS5 GPU – Photo courtesy of PS5 Dev Wiki

PS5 Hacking – What we know so far

The PS5 DevWiki is already up and running, maintained by scene Veteran GregoryRasputin and other helping hands. It gives (minimal for now) details for example on the PUP format, or high resolution pictures of the motherboard and its components.

Of course not much is publicly known about the PS5’s internals and potential vulnerabilities yet. However a few details have started to emerge from the scene.

PS5 Updatelist and PS5 Firmware 2.25

We know that the updatelist XML format is basically the same as that of the PS4. People looking for regular updates on the latest PS5 Firmware can follow SilicaAndPina‘s PS5 Firmware Bot on twitter. For the time being, SilicaandPina is hosting the various firmware updates here.

Firmware 2.25 of the PS5 was just released a couple days ago, and, of course, if you ever want to hack your PS5, we advise not to update. The easiest (but definitely not the cheapest) way to do that is to have 2 PS5s, one for actual gaming, and one that you’ll keep on a shelf, untouched, until a hack is released.

PS5 Browser, and Open Source entry points

Although the PS5 Documentation states it does not have a browser, there is an “internal” web browser available for apps, which is used for example by the help guide on the console. It is reasonably easy to bypass the urls with a proxy (example: https://github.com/KuromeSan/PS5Prxy/releases, but it’s likely any proxy will do as long as you replace manuals.playstation.net with the url of your choice) to display any page requested. In the current firmware, it is apparently even possible to bypass https.

Of course, one reason hackers are looking into the web browser on the console is that it is historically a good entry point for potential vulnerabilities (by loading a malicious webpage). For this reason, hackers are also typically digging into the list of open source software that the PS5 uses (official list here), as it is possible to dig into those dependencies for vulnerabilities, without having to go through reverse engineering first. At the moment, Sony have disclosed that the PS5 uses Webkit, Cairo, Eigen, and FFMpeg.

However webkit has grown pretty secure over time, and a few hackers have called out that looking for vulnerabilities in Webkit is much more time consuming and fruitless than it used to be. It is likely the first entry point to crack the PS5 open will be a hardware vulnerability, that will not be immediately disclosed.

Other PS5 Hacking Tools and findings

• Long Time scene developer skfu has released a series of basic tools for the PS5, at https://github.com/SKFU/ps5tools. For now, these tools can help analyze and extract files in the following formats: CNT, FIH, SLB2.

Very bare skeleton for now, feel free to contributehttps://t.co/4H9Wzxoo26

— SKFU (@SKFU__) November 6, 2020

• Blsunpack still handles PS5 PUP files, according to its dev Zecoxao.
• Developer psxdev has started looking into PS5 Camera internals, and has provided details on the PS4 Camera Adapter for PS5.
• Developer Kiwidog is hinting that he has some existing parsing bugs on PS5. It’s unclear if those are already exploited (at the user level at least) yet.

At least 2 of my bugs survived in parsers, but how to reach 🤔 (no not kernel bugs, can’t confirm that until have a dump)

— kd_tech (@kd_tech_) November 12, 2020

PS5 Hacking, what’s next?

As you can see there is already a lot of activity on the PS5 scene. This is not surprising in the early days of the console. Time will tell us if any of this initial research will lead to an active hacking scene and a jailbreak on the PS5.