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Researcher shows software-only userland access on Nintendo Switch 2
Ars Technica reports Sammy Hajhamid demonstrated a tethered Switch 2 userland jailbreak via SmileBasic 4, short of kernel control.
- New headline Was: “Switch 2 security takes a hit as hackers unlock homebrew access”
- Our desk filed its story
- New headline Was: “Switch 2 jailbreak gives hackers new ways to run homebrew and mod games”
A security researcher has shown a software-only, tethered way to get userland access on Nintendo's Switch 2, Ars Technica reported Thursday, citing Sammy Hajhamid, who posts as Pepsipu1.
Hajhamid told Ars the access lets researchers run homebrew, reverse-engineer and modify Switch 2 games, copy save files off the console, and reach most peripherals through memory-mapped I/O1. The write-up said the work still falls short of kernel-level control of the hardware1.
Ars said the method depends on the original Switch edition of SmileBasic 4, a programming environment that runs on Nintendo hardware, and that the console must stay tethered to a macOS or Linux PC on the same network running a node.js helper1.
According to Ars, Hajhamid used an automated harness, including OpenAI's Codex, to probe SmileBasic's interpreter and found a 32-bit integer overflow when items are removed from an array, which he said yielded an array pointer and limited memory read and write1. He later reported a buffer overflow in FileSystem services that exposed a cached pointer, then said he reached privileged filesystem actions and native code execution through a faked filesystem process1.
Hajhamid posted a proof of concept with extra characters in Mario Kart World, Ars said, and other researchers have shown simple demos and unfinished developer tools on exploited hardware1.
Ars noted that SmileBasic on the 3DS was used in the 2016 smilehax exploit and that Nintendo later removed that version from the 3DS eShop1. The article, as read, did not include a Nintendo comment on the Switch 2 research1.
