PS4/PS5 Mast1c0re exploit: McCaulay Hudson shares Implementation details + PS2 Game Save Editing tool
The Mast1c0re hack, an unpatched PS4/PS5 exploit that leverages the PS2 emulation layer on the consoles, has been recently confirmed to work on recent PS4 and PS5 Firmwares. A few weeks ago, security researcher McCaulay Hudson demonstrated he was able to turn CTurt’s writeup into an actual proof of concept. Today, McCaulay shares his findings and the process, in great detail, with the first blog post of a series of 4.
What is Mast1c0re for PS5 and PS4?
Mast1c0re is an unpatched exploit for PS4 and PS5, which leverages a vulnerability in the PS2 emulation layer of Sony’s newer consoles. The vulnerability was disclosed, and described with great detail, by PlayStation hacker CTurt in September last year.
Back then, CTurt stated Sony had no plan to fix the vulnerability, which seems to be confirmed by recent videos, showing that the vulnerability is still here, in the latest PS5 6.50 firmware (and, it is safe to assume, in PS4 10.01 as well) as of January 2023.
Recently released Beta firmwares PS5 7.00 and PS4 10.50 still need to be confirmed, but there’s good reason to believe they are vulnerable as well.
Implement Mast1c0re on your own…soon ™
McCaulay’s blog post series is not complete yet, but I’m hoping that by post 4 we should have enough details for anyone with the relevant skills to create their own exploit file for the game Okage Shadow King.
Today’s post goes into great details on how the security researcher leverages a PS2 emulator for development and testing, on the PS2 Game save file format, and provides links to the tools he developed to help with leveraging a buffer overflow in the game. (man this sure brings memories)
In particular he released a tool to extract/edit PS2 Game save files about 2 weeks ago, which can be found here: https://github.com/McCaulay/pypsu
You can read McCaulay’s blog post series here for details.
Folks, what’s up with those multipart blog posts, when did that become a thing? Hopefully we won’t have to wait as long as CTurt’s part2 (which isn’t out yet?)