PS5 Relapse Exploit

Exploit chain for PS5 7.00 - 13.60. Contribute to ntfargo/Relapse-Exploit development by creating an account on GitHub.

345 points•therepanic•1 day ago•238 comments•

#exploit #relapse #ps5 #relapse exploit #ps5 relapse #ps5 relapse exploit #chain #contribute

238 comments

Can I use this to make backups of my game saves to USB?

Being somewhat naive to the gaming scene, I only recently discovered that the PS5 prevents you from backing up your game saves to your own physical media - something that was possible on the PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4.

Instead, you have to subscribe to PS Plus and enable cloud backups - and you need a separate subscription per user profile.

I only discovered this after my daughter lost a year of work in Minecraft due to data corruption, and I tried to teach her the value of backing up.

The PS5 may be my last console.

domhabout 17 hours ago

> The PS5 may be my last console.

I'm in agreement with this. I'll likely do some kind of Steam Machine or self-build version running SteamOS. Would lose some exclusives but I don't think they're worth losing my freedom. Paying the money for a computer that I can't actually use leaves a poor taste.

alias_neoabout 16 hours ago

Like GP, I too have been on PlayStation since 1, had all of them on day one, and still have most of them, but PS5 is likely to be my last. I haven't played anything on it since Ragnarok, only my daughter (7yo) uses it occasionally to play Astro.

With Sony's recent moves combined with a lack of games I actually want to play (Laufey might be my last on PS5), I can't see my buying a PS6, particularly with no disc drive.

I have a gaming desktop that runs CachyOS and I game on Steam as well as an ROG Ally running CachyOS and a gaming laptop for my daughter to play Minecraft running CachyOS, as well a reservation for Steam Frame, awaiting my order email.

I'm going to go back to PC gaming, buying on Steam or GOG (DRM free) where possible, and encourage my kids (at least my daughter who's into gaming) in the same direction.

Sony's PlayStation division in particular is no longer about gamers, it's been coming for a while, so I think done with them.

m4rtinkabout 10 hours ago

Yeah, at least since Steam Deck launched & especially with Steam Machine now also being available consoles really don't make any sense.

All the lazy complaints about "I want it to just work", "I don't want to build & maintain a PC" etc. really make no sense any more.

And arguably the breaking point has been much sooner, with the PS4 & Switch both selling you back commodity hardware (x86 APU with FreeBSD for PS4 & ancient NVIDIA Tegra for Switch), just totally locked down, user hostile & with overpriced games.

gchamonliveabout 12 hours ago

You could buy another one used if they aren't ridiculously overpriced just so you can play exclusives. Airgapped, what runs runs, what doesn't run doesn't...

sylwareabout 12 hours ago

If we manage to keep the dev tantrums/planned obsolescence at bay, all you will need, if the game devs or game engine devs are competent, is a lean elf(glibc)/linux distro: a set of glibc libs (interwined with the system ELF loader), the vulkan loader, libasound, a wayland compositor, and related linux userland interfaces.

In the future, we can expect a much simpler file format to replace ELF for CPU executables and dynamic libraries (ELF is beyond obsolete and overkill on modern hardware achitectures and its complexity is source of many issues), and maybe pure and standard GPU hardware command instanciable ring buffers, but that's much further away in the future, as we "don't know yet" (but we do for CPUs), and we still could get GPU vendor specific hardware command instanciable ring buffers (it seems this how the PS5 works).

browsingonlyabout 23 hours ago

If things continue they may be everyone's last console. The next gen might effectively be a video player and controller interface for content rendered outside of your home. No physical games (or saved game backups) at all under this scheme, of course.

robben1234about 22 hours ago

Ask Google, Microsoft or Nvidia why it's not in fact the future of gaming. You need to be rich enough to have fast internet and pay an expensive subscription yet poor enough to fail to afford a GPU at home, all while accepting low bitrate and high input latency. It's not a large addressable market.

iaaanabout 23 hours ago

I've been saying this for years. These companies don't want you to own the compute hardware. They just want to flash the colored pixels in front of you.

m4rtinkabout 10 hours ago

Yeah, like we don't have enough centralization, no control & force feeding already. No thanks, take your Minitel 2.0 and shove it.

MithrilTuxedoabout 21 hours ago

I bet that would be great (for a specific subset of games). MMORPGs come top of mind.

anonymous344about 21 hours ago

xbox 360 is my last console. disconnected 100% from internet. good times only

Gigachadabout 21 hours ago

Letting you backup saves to a USB deprives Sony the ability to sell this to you as a subscription.

For minecraft I'd suggest just installing steamos on an old laptop or something and sticking it behind the TV. It's a much better experience than game consoles, you can just do whatever you want.

Wololoooabout 20 hours ago

Honestly, the steamOS environment is not perfect, but valve has made strides to make things compatible with almost everything under the sun and working hard on optimisation for all their peripherals.

For the previous poster, if they see this, it is to note that the java version will run natively but bedrock might require more fiddling...

red369about 16 hours ago

Just to start a list of consoles that only allow saving to a paid cloud service, I believe the Nintendo Switch is the same model:

https://www.nintendo.com/ph/support/switch/data_management/i...

publlus_enigmaabout 12 hours ago

Was also burned by this when the WiFi module on my switch died. Had to send it away to be repaired, whereupon they swapped the main board (including all my saved games!). But the only way to backup before sending it away was ... Via the nonfunctional WiFi to the cloud.

Modified3019about 18 hours ago

> I only discovered this after my daughter lost a year of work in Minecraft due to data corruption, and I tried to teach her the value of backing up.

Ouch, sorry for her loss.

publlus_enigmaabout 12 hours ago

Thank you. It was tough for her!

Muromec1 day ago

If I know anything about those communities, they sit on a bag of zero days and another bag of leads to zero days in the bootloader or whatever everjail they need to break out of.

MBCook1 day ago

I saw a post from someone who worked in the scene recently, seems they were someone famous. I don’t follow things so I’m not sure. Basically they were giving up because new people to the scene were just discovering things with AI and then immediately disclosing them to the world, allowing Sony to patch them before they really got used.

It sounded like things may have changed.

arprocter1 day ago

Might've been 'PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand"'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727627

ctippett1 day ago

I noticed this exact flavour of frustration in the webOS jailbreak scene. Some newcomer proudly announced a vulnerability they found only to be met with hostility because it was seen as premature and unnecessary given there was already an existing jailbreak available that had yet to be patched.

Synthetic73461 day ago

Sucks for the hoarder, but that is indeed how bug bounties are supposed to work. The first reporter gets the payout, disincentivizing sitting on valid vulns.

captainmuonabout 17 hours ago

Instead of being angry with people who publish exploits, they should be angry with Sony for patching the exploits or for locking down the console in the first place.

I am the customer, most people are customers, in an ideal world there would be customer protection laws serving us and not the content industry. But that is not how laws work. Realizing this actually radicalized me.

MaxBarraclough1 day ago

At a glance, it looks like it exploits a bug in WebKit's JavaScriptCore JavaScript engine.

Does the PS5's WebKit use JavaScriptCore with JIT enabled? Have to wonder if Sony will respond by disabled its JIT, to narrow the attack surface.

FlowingRiver1 day ago

JavaScript is the gift and grift that keeps on giving. A security nightmare when in Flash, but a gate way to freedom nowadays.

GranPC1 day ago

Flash didn't use JS, but rather ActionScript. Which was very much inspired by ECMAScript, especially AS3 -- but Flash's security holes were all of Adobe's doing. Good times.

alwaysthiserror1 day ago

Their store and possibly their entire main OS menu sure feel like "webshit" on the PS4 and PS5. I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't using Webtech for layouts, formatting, and scripting (with Javascript).

On the PS3, only the store was webshit, and it performed so amazingly poorly (and crashed all the time) that I never bought anything on it, and I doubt I'm alone in that. The PS3 could have handled a website well (obviously), but not the trash heap of a "web app" they used.

From what I can tell, they didn't learn a lesson from this, they've just benefitted from beefier hardware to keep their newer stores usable (and I may be imagining it, but performance on menus and in their store already seems to have declined a lot from when I purchased my PS5).

Given all that, I'm not sure how much Javascript performance they can afford to give up without making their entire system's UI experience totally suck. They could improve the quality of their system and use of web tech to improve performance, like it's a joke any of this isn't perfectly, buttery smooth on a system that powerful even if it is Javascript and HTML and CSS... but given they never seemed inclined to do that even in the pre-AI-slop days...

MaxBarraclough1 day ago

They could apply a different policy to their web-based dashboard GUIs (if these do exist) than to the web browser.

FlowingRiver1 day ago

It seems like a case of their skills couldn't match their ambition. To much tech and not enough restraint to manage it.

I say this because on the Wii, a considerably slower machine, they kind of managed it well. The Store and even the system setting menu are just HTML rendered using Opera.

monocasa1 day ago

> On the PS3, only the store was webshit

I mean, only sort of. Almost all of the UI portion of XMB was written in PSJS (PlayStation JavaScript), which was their internal scripting language of choice. It manipulates ha is almost exactly a webgl context in order to draw to the screen (which is the main reason why the PS3 supported a pretty low perf opengles library in addition to gcm).

asadm1 day ago

I wish they waited until gta6

FlowingRiver1 day ago

This is probably going to the be holy grail later this year. In light of the recent explosion in decompilation/recompilation efforts, the first one that can get a copy off their machine and running on PC will get a lot of clout. Essentially, if they won't release it on PC, the people will just release it themselves. LLM assisted recompilation are a mighty force that is yield results with surprising speed.

There are already some PS5 games getting this treatment.

throwawayk7h1 day ago

GTA6 won't be released for PC?

enos_feedler1 day ago

The exploit has been fixed in 14.0. Realistically gta6 will require it

wolrah1 day ago

I think the point they're trying to make is that, assuming this is an implementation of the bug that caused the PS5 Linux dev to quit, it was known about and had been being sat on intentionally to prevent it from being fixed before GTA 6 came out, but some other group found it and reported it.

charcircuit1 day ago

Use this exploit to bypass the check.

h4x0rr1 day ago

Couldn't you spoof the update to the PS Store to still get the ROM?

Daklone1 day ago

Playing PC Games from Steam on PS5 would be a win.

Cyph0n1 day ago

Might be a reality quite soon! https://github.com/boykopovar/AnyPS5

cassianoleal1 day ago

This is the opposite of what GP asked for.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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