The PS5 has reportedly been jailbroken

A limited but working jailbreak for the PlayStation 5 hardware has reportedly been released, potentially enabling players to install unsigned or unofficial software.

The news was reported on Twitter by modder Lance McDonald, who previously made a name for himself by releasing an unofficial patch that made Bloodborne run at 60 frames per second on PS4.

Although McDonald doesn’t appear to have discovered the PS5 jailbreak himself, he does show footage of it in action.

As well as showing that the jailbreak gives him access to a debug menu, he also shows that it enables him to install a PS4 PKG file (i.e. a backup of a game), proving this by installing the now-delisted PT demo.

At this stage the jailbreak is allegedly extremely limited – it‘s only said to work on PS5 consoles with firmware version 4.03, which was released in October 2021 and replaced with version 4.50 in December 2021.

According to the exploit’s creator, it may be possible to apply the jailbreak to PS5 consoles with earlier firmware versions than 4.03, but later firmware versions won’t work at the moment.

Even if a player does have a console with the 4.03 firmware, the exploit’s creator warns that it will still only work around 30% of the time, usually requiring multiple attempts to execute.

Even once the player does this, they’ll be strictly limited in what they can do at this stage, it’s claimed. While the exploit is said to give read/write access, it doesn’t give execute access. This means that although McDonald was allegedly able to install the PT teaser on his PS5, he won’t actually be able to run it yet.

Given the limitations of the alleged exploit and the fact it only works on a specific, year-old firmware version, it will currently likely only be of use to other hackers curious to see how it works and whether they can use it at a starting point for something more effective.

It will nevertheless be a concern for Sony to see some progress being made, albeit minor, on attempts to bypass the PS5’s security.