PlayStation hacker TheFloW had a talk earlier this month at the Hexacon infosec conference, where he described his BD-JB exploit chain as well as the PIV6 PS5 Kernel hack. This presentation is now available on Youtube (video below).

BD-JB and PS5 Kernel exploit by TheFloW

TheFloW disclosed the BD-JB exploit chain for PS4 and PS5 back in June, followed by his disclosure of a PS5 Kernel exploit in September.

It’s worth mentioning that TheFloW’s presentation at hexacon does not bring any additional information or breakthrough on the PS5, just summarizing the two exploits mentioned above. In other words, if you’ve been following the PS5 scene closely, there’s nothing new in this presentation, but it’s always great to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

PS5 Hacking scene making limited progress

Since TheFloW revealed the PS5 exploit, there’s been some progress made by the scene, with working implementations released for PS5 Firmwares 3.00 to 4.51 included. However, although the exploit allows for arbitrary read/write in the PS5’s data structures (Ram and/or hard drive), multiple security mitigations such as XOM and its hypervisor model have prevented significant progress on PS5 hacks so far.

Many tinkerers have been playing in this limited sandbox (we now have an elf loader integrated into the exploit, an FTP server, and recently access was given to the PS5 Redis server), but no significant announce has been made on hacking the console further. It is possible that some hacking groups have made further progress under the hood, but nothing has been publicly announced recently.