PlayStation 5 Jailbreak Hacked with Cryptogenic Vulnerability

Jailbreak isn’t just for iPhones. In fact, virtually any device running the firmware can be hacked to allow the end user to run mods not originally intended by the manufacturer of said device. Sony fans found out on Monday after an apparent jailbreak for the PlayStation 5, Sony’s latest gaming console as of 2022, surfaced.

A tweet posted late Sunday by Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) has already received over 2.1 million views at the time of this writing and appears to showcase a PlayStation 5 jailbreak based on a kernel exploit called Cryptogenic and a Webkit vulnerability present in the Sony version. firmware 4.03.

The Cryptogenic kernel exploit mentioned above is open source on GitHub and was originally published on Sunday by Twitter user @SpecterDev . The page displays a lot of information about Cryptogenic and the work that went into making it possible.

We learned in a blog post that the Cryptogenic exploit can support older firmware with a little tweaking, however it does not support firmware newer than 4.03 as the Webkit exploit is patched in newer releases. Other caveats include the instability of the exploit and a 30% success rate, which means it may take several attempts to use the kernel before it is successful.

The Cryptogenic exploit appears to allow read/write access to kernel memory and unlock access to the PlayStation 5’s debug settings menu, but does not allow code execution, so users cannot download or run binaries, patch, or plug into kernel space. This means mods that we like to call “jailbreak tweaks”here in the iPhone jailbreak community are not possible with this PlayStation 5 jailbreak.

It’s also worth noting that PlayStation 5 firmware version 4.03 is about a year old, so most PlayStation 5 users have probably already updated to an unsupported version.

Caveats aside, this is a pretty significant achievement and it certainly keeps us looking forward to what the future might bring.