Following the disclosure by Sony of TheFloW‘s PS5 IPV6 Kernel exploit (based on an old PS4 exploit), other hackers of the PS5 scene have been hard at work replicating the vulnerability, and trying to turn it into something usable for the community. Some progress is being made, but it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.

PS5 much harder to exploit than the PS4

Initial statements by ZNullPtr had given the scene hopes that a HEN (Homebrew ENabler) was possibly close, but he has since then corrected his tweet to say such a thing would take a while  (and overall all involved devs have been insisting that whatever comes out of this exploit will initially only be useful to other hackers and devs). Silver lining, he stated other hackers have kernel access and are looking into the vulnerability. Which confirms hackers are hard at work on this.

I know everyone wants updates..
At least two [more] developers have limited kernel access.
There *won’t be ‘hen’ for some time, so this will only be useful for developers.

— Z (@Znullptr) September 26, 2022

PS4 hacker SpecterDev has also come out of the woods to “temper expectations”: “if/when the IPV6 exploit is released, post-exploitation is not as easy as PS4. Homebrew will take a lot of effort. XOM prevents dumping kernel and HV prevents patching/hooking kernel. It’ll mostly only really be useful for devs”, he says. Again, the good news here is to see that some PS4 veterans such as Specter are seriously looking into this.

That’s probably the route that will have to be taken at least at first. I believe it should be possible but will involve a good bit of RE and such, it also will be a little jank and you won’t have the customization/flexibility that exists in PS4 homebrew for example.

— Specter (@SpecterDev) September 28, 2022

The Hypervisor (HV) on the PS5 means all applications run in some Virtual Machine, which could honestly be enough for some homebrew environment, but will not let hackers access and patch kernel functions, the holy grail for a true Jailbreak. In parallel, eXecute Only Memory (XOM) prevents from reading (and therefore dumping, let alone reverse engineering) the kernel from within the context of the exploit.

PS5 vulnerability is still in early stages

Some folks noted that developer John Tornblom has pushed code for the vulnerability in his github repository. SpecterDev was quick to note that this is the FreeBSD 12 version, while, unless I’m incorrect, PS5 is based on FreeBSD 11. In other words, this repo is far from what people are waiting for, and is probably the very beginning of the investigation efforts for this developer.

In conclusion, although many developers have had their eyes and brains on this vulnerability, the PS5 is a significantly different beast than the PS4, with additional security measures. We can currently hope for some usermode homebrew environment à-la HBL, and frankly getting some usermode homebrew loader for the PS5 would actually be awesome. Questions remains on the feasibility of this and how long such a tool would take to make.

Patience is key here.