Someone Finally Jailbroke the PS5—Just After Sony Said Players Don’t Own Their Games

By Jose Antonio Lanz

Someone finally did it. A public jailbreak for the PS5, dubbed Relapse, works on firmware 7.00 through 13.60 and all it takes to achieve is a DNS change and a few seconds.

It comes at an interesting time for the company, just weeks removed from Sony's admission in court that its players don't actually own the games they buy digitally.

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The recipe, posted on X by Nathan Fargo and shared by console scene figure ApolloHB, consists of setting the PS5's primary DNS to 45.56.67.85, opening the User Guide, typing the exploit page's address into its URL box, and waiting.

The code sits on GitHub under an MIT license, so it’s free to use, modify, and improve. It chains two attacks. The jailbreak lets users load payloads through an ELF loader, meaning they can run homebrew apps (third-party apps not approved by Sony), and game backups among other things.

Piracy is the obvious worry. Users on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit are already discussing which games run on Relapse. It may also open the possibility for players to run copies of games they have not bought.

The repo's disclaimer says the project is for "educational and security research purposes only" and does not endorse piracy.

It's a rough jailbreak. It is tethered, so everything stops working after a reboot until the exploit runs again. The repo warns that WebKit "may need several attempts" and that the kernel stage can hang or panic the console.

The project description also warns that using it may lead to system failures, data loss or account bans, so users should be aware of the risks.

The ownership problem

The timing is awkward for Sony. In a class action filed in June in the Northern District of California, four PlayStation customers allege the "Buy Now" button misleads people into thinking they own games. Sony's answer is that it is "not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining 'ownership.'"

Sony points to license terms saying the software is "licensed to you, not sold." Its main request is to move the dispute into private arbitration, and the judge has not ruled on that motion as of yet.

Relapse attacks a different half of the ownership question. The lawsuit is about what you own in the store. The jailbreak is about what you can do with the machine you already paid for.

This has been a long debated issue, especially under the consumers’ rights perspective, and the right to repair. The most famous case of jailbreak litigation happened between Apple and iOS jailbreak Justin Freeman, who ended up winning the case—even if Apple made its OS consistently more resistant to jailbreaks with every update.

Primavera De Filippi, director of research at CERSA, said that when you buy a digital asset from a platform, "the platform ultimately retains control of the asset." Relapse hands some of that control back to users, for as long as their console stays on old firmware.

Consoles updated to Sony's 14.00 firmware, released September 16, are not compatible with Relapse

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