Paul Morris·

PS4 5.05 Jailbreak Exploit Released, Here Are The Details

If the chaos and uncertainty in the world of iOS jailbreaking are enough to bring you out in hives then you best keep your nose out of the PlayStation 4 scene. With that said, things are hotting up on that front with the confirmation that firmware version 5.05 is vulnerable to a discovered WebKit exploit.

A developer in that community by the name of AlexZzZ discovered the exploit in version 5.01 of Sony’s PlayStation 4 firmware.

This discovery came hot on the heels of a full jailbreak release for PS4s running firmware version 4.55 and immediately catapulted global attention onto the PlayStation jailbreak community, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the George Hotz-versus-Sony PS3 fiasco many years. Now, with those eyes watching, this new usermode exploit discovered in WebKit gives the community one of the two exploits needed to put together a full jailbreak for the PlayStation 4 on that particular firmware version.

Interestingly, the discovered WebKit vulnerability is the exact same exploit which has recently been publicized and used by Team Reswitched to bring homebrew capabilities to the excellent Nintendo Switch hardware, meaning that it’s highly likely that the work carried out on that project has been the inspiration for porting the vulnerability across to PlayStation 4.

This doesn’t exactly give us a jailbreak for PlayStation 4 running firmware version 5.05 yet, but it is essentially one of the core components needed before one can be produced in future. If someone could find a kernel-level vulnerability which can be exploited to give privilege escalation then it’s highly possible that we can see something grow from this discovery.

If you are interested in the PlayStation from a security perspective and want to learn more about this WebKit vulnerability CVE-2017-7005, then you can find the information and proof-of-concept project over at GitHub.

As previously mentioned, it’s currently unknown if this will actually progress into anything usable from a public PlayStation 4 ownership perspective, but for security researchers and other interested parties, it’s a highly interesting topic.

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