PS5 firmware security analysis using Codex and ChatGPT

The author, Devon, conducted academic source-code analysis on the FreeBSD 11.0.0 kernel and the WebKit browser engine to investigate the security architecture of PlayStation 5 firmware. The research, documented in an open-source project on GitHub, involved using Codex and ChatGPT to trace function call chains, data structure layouts, and allocation patterns. The author reports that over 130 questions were answered by the model with source citations. The author notes that OpenAI's Daybreak content filter repeatedly triggered on prompts involving structural terminology, which the author suggests may have contributed to the subsequent deactivation of their account. The author maintains that the work was strictly academic and did not involve accessing proprietary systems or creating exploits. Other researchers have noted that while LLM passes over JavaScriptCore (JSC) can identify missing checks, the false positive rate for lifetime bugs remains high.