PS4 jailbreak route reaches 13.52 as PS5 work hits 13.60

PlayStation 4 consoles on firmware 13.00 through 13.52 now have a browser-based route into homebrew, after a WebKit exploit for the console's built-in browser was published to GitHub and turned into a harness anyone can run. The same scene is closing in on the PlayStation 5: the project extending support to Sony's newer console reports that its userland stage already runs on firmware 13.60, leaving only the kernel stage unsolved.

What leaked, and what it does not do

The repository was created on 18 September and updated the next day. It carries a single-page exploit that runs in the PS4 browser, reports each stage of the chain on screen and can export its own log for other people to read. Its credits name three people: mansoor0x for the original script, primehat06-wq for putting it on GitHub, and OptiTronOffical for wrapping it in a testable harness and running it on console.

The same notes are blunt about the ceiling. This is the userland half only, it halts after four passes, and it has to be chained to a kernel exploit before a console is actually jailbroken. That distinction is the whole business with console exploits: a browser bug gets code running inside the sandbox, and the kernel bug is what turns that into control of the machine.

Which is why the version number matters. Earlier PS4 routes stopped well short of here. PPPwn, the PPPoE kernel exploit, topped out at firmware 11.00 when it arrived in 2024, and the GoldHEN project's own loader lists its Lapse and Poops chains as covering 9.00 to 13.00. A userland leak for 13.50 and 13.52 shifts that ceiling by two more firmware releases, and it does it through the browser rather than a USB stick or a network cable.

What a jailbroken PS4 actually gets you

The payload most owners reach for is GoldHEN, the PS4 homebrew enabler whose published releases still end at version 2.4b18 from October 2024, which means any build that claims support for 13.52 comes from the community rather than the upstream project. What it buys is not new games but patches: the project maintains a repository of community fixes for existing titles, and the long-running trick is lifting the 30 frames-per-second cap on games that were never updated to run faster. Bloodborne is the example the scene keeps reaching for.

On PS5, the userland half already runs

The PS5 picture is the same scene with a different temperament. The public route today is Slopkit, a WebKit-based host that covers firmware 9.00 to 12.00. A derivative project published as bwslop has pushed further: its repository advertises 13.60 userland support, and it documents the work in the open, down to which measurements were taken on real hardware and which were inherited from somebody else's notes.

Those notes are unusually candid, and they are worth reading before the next round of viral videos. They record hardware runs on a 13.60 console dated 16 September, syscall reachability verified across 13.00 to 13.60, and the standing warning that nothing in the repository writes kernel memory on that firmware. They state that nobody has published 13.60 kernel offsets, that the kernel bugs which worked on earlier firmware are patched there, and that the only live lead is an AIO use-after-free. The project's own estimate for a full 13.60 jailbreak arriving soon is 10 to 20 per cent.

Part of the reason is architectural. The PS5 hypervisor enforces kernel write-protection, so the tricks that end a PS4 chain tend to stop short on the newer machine, and offsets still have to be confirmed on real consoles before any of it counts. Nothing here has been acknowledged by Sony, and no firmware response has been issued.

The risk side

None of this is sanctioned or signed. The payloads come from strangers, the hosts are community-run, and the PS4 harness credits a script whose own repository admits the original author may never have meant to share it. Running any of it risks a console ban on hardware you take online, voids whatever warranty is left, and has a shelf life measured in patches.

Our opinion

The interesting part is not that a nine-year-old console can be cracked; it is the difference in how the two halves of this scene operate. The PS4 route arrived as a leak, somebody else's script wrapped in a day-old harness and pushed out with a hand-written credit line. The PS5 effort is the opposite: a public engineering log with hardware measurements, dead ends stated plainly and honest odds attached to its own prospects. Only one of those deserves your trust, and it is not the one with the lower firmware number.

It should also temper the comfortable line that the PS5 is unbreakable. Userland on 13.60 already runs, the previous kernel bugs are patched rather than unexploitable, and what stands between the scene and a full chain is a single kernel stage nobody has solved yet. Sony's real advantage in this fight has never been secrecy. It is the ability to ship a patch faster than the scene can find the next bug.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels