Star Wars completionists looking to add a copy of a relatively obscure PlayStation 4 game called Star Wars Racer Revenge to their collection might find themselves wondering why on Earth the game is suddenly so expensive. The game—first released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2, and re-released for the PS4 to general indifference in 2019—is suddenly being listed for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Neither the game’s sudden popularity nor its skyrocketing price tag has anything to do with its actual merits as entertainment. No, Star Wars Racer Revenge is changing hands for lots of money because the game—and, specifically, the disc-based version—is allegedly the key to a newly discovered method for jailbreaking Sony’s PS5 hardware.
The hack appears to take advantage of the newfound availability of the console’s ROM keys, which leaked online over New Year’s Eve. For anyone who wants more detail, The Cybersec Guru just published a deep dive into how PS5 security works and why the leak is a very big problem for Sony. The short version is that these keys are part of the PS5’s most fundamental level of security—and, by their very nature, they can’t be changed or updated, which means that Sony can’t issue a patch to address this issue.
As The Cybersec Guru’s post points out, the ROM leak doesn’t in and of itself allow for jailbreaking the PS5: “[Having] the keys allow developers to find exploits easier, but you still need an entry point … to use them.” The Star Wars Racers Revenge disc appears to be the first such entry point discovered, and as per a short video posted on Twitter, it appears to have allowed developer Gezine to access the game’s debugging console and inject code to print a short message onscreen.
Sony has managed to keep the PS5 free from low-level jailbreaking since the console’s release in November 2020. There have been various exploits at levels further up the device’s security chain, but these can (and have) been addressed with firmware updates. A jailbreak using the leaked ROM keys would be an entirely different matter.
At this point, the Star Wars Racers Revenge hack is essentially a proof of concept, and it’s a long and difficult road from printing “UwU” to the game’s console to writing full-blown custom firmware of the sort that is available for the PS3 and PS4. It’s also worth noting that some in the PlayStation homebrew scene are pouring cold water on the news, suggesting that the ROM keys alone are not enough to allow for such a jailbreak. Developer Jose Coixao (aka zecoixao), for instance, wrote on Twitter that the keys “are NOT enough to pwn a PS5.” He argued that jailbreakers would also require access to two other vital security components, “or alternatively, [they would] need to find bugs in the ROM that you can use to exploit the PS5. Neither of these are easy and [both] require immense work.”
Still, today’s news is confirmation that this work can at least begin in earnest—and most worryingly for Sony, it’s something that the company can’t really do anything to prevent. For now, maybe they’ll start buying up copies of that Star Wars game.