As we guessed last week in an article entitled “Fail0verflow to announce a PS4 Jailbreak Next week?“, Fail0verflow announced today at the CCC that they owned the PS4 and have Linux up and running on the PS4. They did a very short presentation to showcase the hack, and ran a Pokémon game within Linux on the PS4.

The PS4 hack entry point runs through what seems to be a Webkit exploit. It is likely they are running the hack on a 1.76 PS4 because of that, but it is also very possible that their exploit runs on higher firmwares (and they’re just using the PS4 Webkit 1.76 entry point for convenience).

Fail0verflow hint at critical bugs in the southbridge of the GPU, but do not give more details on the exploit in their presentation, besides “NOP Command is broken on the GPU”.

Linux for PS4 – Release?

Fail0verflow promised in their presentation that they would release the Linux patches to compile for the PS4 soon. They however stated that people wishing to use Linux on the PS4 should “bring their own exploit”, adding “PS4 security is crappy enough that you don’t need us for that”. In other words, the exploit they found will not be released.

Other hackers, contacted about this announce, have told us that the Fail0verflow hack is probably hardware based and a release would not necessarily be convenient anyway . Update: we’re getting conflicting signals on that: it is also possible this is a software hack (a Kernel exploit in the PS4 firmware), running on top of the Webkit 1.76 exploit. Assuming a new userland exploit (similar to the webkit one) was found on recent firmwares, this whole thing could run on recent PS4 firmwares without any hardware mod.

So, yeah, Linux for the PS4 will be released in the short term, but this won’t be helpful for the majority of us, who don’t have the exploit to run it. At this point though, If you own a PS4 running on Firmware 1.76, it’s probably wise that you do not update (see here some links on where to get a PS4 running on 1.76).

Pokémon running on the PS4

Towards the end of the presentation, Fail0verflow ran a Pokémon démo on the exploited PS4. Although this was probably made ironically because it’s always fun to run Nintendo games on a Sony console, it was also a weird message to the homebrew community: “don’t bother writing emulators or homebrew games, Linux is all you need on your PS4”.

Biteyourconsole have extracted the presentation on youtube and you can watch it below:

You can check our PS4 Jailbreak page for more details on the latest PS4 hack developments.

Source: The original video and announce can be found on the CCC Relive page, the Fail0verflow part is at 1:31:30 in the video.

Thanks to all the people who have contacted me about this 🙂