PS5: LibHijacker can now load games (not run them yet)

Astrelsky‘s LibHijacker is making steady progress into becoming a Homebrew Loader for the PS5. Zecoxao announced today on Twitter that the latest revision of the code can now load games. PS5 Retail games are apparently implied here (not only homebrew). There is of course still a long way to get PS5 running Homebrew, let alone pirated games, but it now seems to really be in the realm of possibility.

Before you ask: the tools we’re talking about in this article require a hacked PS5 in order to run. See details here on what Firmwares of PS5 can be hacked.

What is libhijacker for the PS5?

Libhijacker is a mechanism to run separate processes (homebrew) on the PS5, “escaping” the initially hacked process (either Webbkit or BD-JB). This means, among other things, that exiting the original Webkit/Bluray player process doesn’t close the exploit anymore, so running a game (official or homebrew) while still being in a “hacked” context is now doable.

In other words, this means things such as running a homebrew, modding games at runtime, or more, are now a possibility. Think Homebrew games, patches, cheats, 60 FPS mods, and the like.

With its latest evolution, you can think of LibHijacker as the very first Homebrew Loader, or Homebrew ENabler (HEN) for the PS5. Astrelsky is demonstrating that even under the constraints of the PS5 Hypervisor and with Kernel XOM still active, a lot of things can be achieved with the exploit we have for firmwares 3.xx/4.xx.

PS5 LibHijacker – the current status

Astrelsky has been committing changes to Libhijacker’s “wip” branch almost on a daily basis, and pushed today a change that “add game app support”. The game app support in question lets libhijacker load an ELF file (from a PS5 Homebrew or game, sent remotely from a computer), prepare it for loading (relocations and the like), then run it with a barebones debugger attached to it.

Interestingly, there are no actual PS5 games to be tested at the moment, for most people: There are no “full fledged” homebrew apps for the PS5 yet (interesting Chicken-Egg scenario here of having to build the loader and the homebrew apps in parallel), and as far as retail games are concerned, to my understanding, the only way to dump them at the moment is Sleirsgoevy’s ps5-self-dumper, a tool that only works on Firmware 4.03.

Astrelsky has mentioned on discord that some people are working on a test homebrew.

If you’re one of the lucky people on firmware 4.03, you can essentially dump your own games to give this a try. Mbcrump has a good video on how this is achieved:

At this point in my opinion there is no question that Homebrew is coming to the PS5. For retail games piracy however, I’d need to see it to believe it. Although in theory, once decrypted, a game could run through the same loading process as homebrews, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more bumps in the road at the moment.

LibHijacker Download

• You can download the latest source of LibHijacker here.
• Sleirsgoevy’s ps5-self-dumper is required to dump your PS5 games, (although the video above by mbcrump will take you through the full process which is pretty heavy for the time being)

Although the dumping tools only work on 4.03, once you have acquired a decrypted game, LibHijacker itself should work on any hackable PS5. Keep in mind that this is a tool that is actively in development though, and this will most likely not be useful to you at the moment unless you’re a developer.