PS5: etaHEN is coming to byepervisor supported firmwares

PlayStation developer LightningMods has been actively working on porting his PS5 HEN etaHEN to the latest Byepervisor exploit. This would bring the popular HEN to earlier Firmware consoles, but more importantly, down the line this version should in theory allow for more performance and features than kstuff.

PS5 – Byepervisor vs kstuff

For quite some time, the PS5 scene has been enjoying a Jailbreak for consoles on Firmwares up to 4.51 included* . We have learned however that a Jailbreak in itself isn’t exactly enough, as the console’s overlord, the hypervisor, still heavily limits what a Jailbroken console can do. In particular, reading/writing into kernel memory is prevented by the hypervisor, meaning that runtime patches (think plugins and customization of the firmware) is theoretically impossible, even with a Jailbroken PS5.

In practice however, sleirsgoevy‘s kstuff has allowed us to do some of that, with a clever mechanism that modifies registers at runtime. This has unlocked a lot of functionality for Jailbroken PS5s, and is why today we can enjoy etaHEN, a Homebrew Enabler for the PS5. But kstuff isn’t easy to port to additional firmwares, can possibly be slow at runtime, and generally speaking, isn’t ideal.

This is where byepervisor comes into the picture, as it finally gives us the possibility to read and write to the kernel memory at runtime. (I invite you to have a look at SpecterDev’s presentation and files on Byepervisor if you want to know more on how he managed to break PS5’s highest level of Software security.)

Bypervisor version of etaHEN coming to PS5

Lightningmods has recently stated he’s successfully ported etaHEN to a bypervisor-enabled PS5.

EtaHEN brings a lot of customizations to a hacked console: a modified Debug menu, plugins support, a Homebrew Store, Blu-Ray license activation, fself/fpkg support (via kstuff), Itemzflow (game browser  + integrated game Dumper), cheat/mods support (lots of work by Illusion in there), FTP Server, ELF Loader, and more.

Technically, a lot of those are things you could load individually with payloads, but having them all integrated in one centralized tool is way more comfortable (From a user perspective, it’s ok to think of etaHEN as the rough equivalent of GoldHEN on PS4, or a Custom Firmware on older generation consoles)

We could see optimized versions of etaHEN and ItemzFlow showing up for PS5 soon, as the developer has also confirmed he’s ported his popular homebrew/game browser to the lower firmwares.

Of course, these will be limited to the Firmwares that are actually vulnerable to Byepervisor, which means Firmwares 1.xx and 2.xx at the moment.

Source: LightningMods

* There is also a new Jailbreak, umtx, available on Firmwares up to 5.50, but a lot of important tools such as etaHEN haven’t been ported to higher firmwares yet, and kstuff offsets port is ongoing and… difficult as far as I understand