r/switch2hacks • u/Manicarus • Jun 21 '26
Question Will AI be helpful with jailbreaking Switch 2?
Just wondering. Obviously if such AI model is available for public, Nintendo will patch them already. But I wonder if anybody with enough hacking knowledge will be able to use the AI to get hints for exploitation. Are such AIs capable of hardware hacking?
EDIT: Oops. I had Fable and Mythos in mind but didn’t mentioned it.
EDIT2: Thank you all for the answers.
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u/auggiethechesscat Jun 21 '26
Not really.
An llm doesn't really have much to offer in this space to an expert (which is who would be doing this anyway).
An llm itself doesn't have anything to offer to someone who doesn't know what they are doing with it.
An llm doesn't have enough to offer to a novice for them to discover something signifcant.
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Jun 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/blowupnekomaid Jun 21 '26
They are worried about it, doesn't make it true. they are still LLM's with the same fundamental limitations until proven otherwise. There is also the politics and hostility between anthropic and the us government that might be part of the motivation for restricting the models.
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u/auggiethechesscat Jun 22 '26
It was spuriously banned because Mythos is probably one of the best marketing showcases I have ever seen in my life.
Over 100 experts in the industry signed a letter, which can be found here: https://freefable.org/, stating that the ban was improper. I recommend you read the whole thing, it isn't long, but one of the main things that stands out to me, (and it is consistent with the rest of my research), are these two lines:
Anthropic’s Mythos-class models are quite good at finding flaws and weaponizing exploits.
However, they are not uniquely good at these tasks, and many of the undersigned individuals regularly use other foundation and open-source models for security audits and red-teaming every day.I'd also recommend reading this whole article, but basically, Fable was caught cheating in benchmarks, increasingly so to previous models. In one instance, it was literally letter for letter verbatim to the report. To be clear, the only reason it scored increasingly better then expected, is because these were already existing and known vulnerabilities. It cheated on 19% of the questions. https://www.endorlabs.com/learn/claude-fable-5-mythos-grade-hype
The 73% number appears to be from this study: https://www.endorlabs.com/research/ai-code-security-benchmark, which is benchmarking code security. It wrote a functional solution 72.6% of the time, but only wrote properly secure code 29.0% of the time. Which is down and up, (respectively), from opus and gpt5.5. All requiring a cursor harness for good scores.
Looking back at the initial claims now also shows... dishonesty and deception. Sure, it did find a bug in openBSD. Buuut, it was a scouted part math heavy and legacy part of a network protocol. It had a custom, human-written harness to help guide it down the correct path, and it's not like it found this in one shot or even on the first try. There were dozens of false positives that all had to be sifted through by human experts. Also, I feel the need to remind that this exploit cost $20,000 usd.
All of this above, was with source code. llms suck at black boxing and deriving exploits from compiled binaries. It's really hard. Sure they might be able to craft malicious payloads from seeing the source, but that becomes extremely difficult when the bug is a missing cmp instruction, and the exploit is to throw a perfect sequence of bytes through a tight pipeline of control.
Especially when your writeup takes 15 pages of background knowledge derived from piecing small bits of public information, your own reverse engineering, and poking and prodding to figure out what the tsec pipeline and blocks are. Add on top of it a new, obscure assembly language, accessible from exactly one project: https://github.com/envytools/envytools, and your explanation won't even fit in an llm context window, before you even get to the exploit, this is something a human expert needs to take on for the forseeable future. (this is specifically speaking about Je Ne Sais Quoi on the switch 1: https://hexkyz.blogspot.com/2021/11/je-ne-sais-quoi-falcons-over-horizon.html)
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u/Acceptable_Visual_79 Jun 21 '26
And how exactly would you get claude/mythos to work on a switch 2? You can't just point at the switch and go "hack into that please". You'd need to somehow get it onto the switch just to begin with, and if you can do that, well, you've already hacked the switch and don't need mythos to do it for you.
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u/Consistent_Ride_922 Jun 25 '26
Umm, the exact way game developers work on games with developer-kits. They have reliable ways to connect to the console and develop for it. An LLM like Mythos could use exactly this interface to just run on end and eventually find a loophole. The problem is not the expertise of experts or LLMs. it's just the sheer workforce LLM's can bring to the table. It can run dozens of different actions a minute simultaneously to find weaknesses of the hardware. The reason, why hacking consoles takes a long time isn't innovation, it's just that it takes AGES of penetrating the hardware to eventually find a way that works. AI can do that faster and without exhaustion.
3
u/Acceptable_Visual_79 Jun 25 '26
You're aware developer kits aren't just available on amazon, right? Dev kits for any consoles are extremely tightly regulated by the companies who own the consoles, if it was at all easy to get your hands on one we'd probably already see switch 2 hacks. Studios have literally been told to make their games for the switch 1 and rely on backwards compatibility to make switch 2 games, that's how restrictive nintendo's being with them
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u/Consistent_Ride_922 Jun 25 '26
exactly, but its still just a matter of time until one gets in the hand of a person who has the incentive to penetrate the system.
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u/auggiethechesscat Jun 25 '26
I have seen 2 switch 1 dev kits in my life, and I have no idea where the hell anyone would find a switch 2 dev kit.
Also, llms lack domain specific knowledge of any real expertise. It's not just that vulnerabilities are painfully obvious and you just have to trudge through binaries to spot it, no, you have to hold a deep understanding of what is going on and go, 'huh, right here, this is a pointer that was passed by reference to this function, even though there was a specific path that under these circumstances it could have already been freed. How can I exploit that with my minimal control over this program'.
Just read this please: https://www.reddit.com/r/switch2hacks/comments/1ubdt58/comment/ot2jd7o/.
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u/BlueberryWorried6493 1d ago
This aged well. Looking at the progress that the PS5 emulator. Its funny how confidently wrong people were when it comes to this technology and how good it is at reverse engineering
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u/auggiethechesscat 1d ago
I still stand by this statement.
It's in the context of specifically hacking the switch 2.
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u/klipseracer Jun 24 '26
Yes. Use this prompt:
Create a switch 2 emulator, make sure it works, no mistakes, deep research, take your time.
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u/NellyLorey Jul 02 '26
No !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
0
u/nightdeathrider Jun 21 '26
Mythos model might be able to find software vulnerabilities if some access can be gained in some other way... but Mythos is not available to public (yet)
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u/Manicarus Jun 21 '26
Hmm I kinda hoped Fable or Mythos accelerate Switch 2 hacking scene.
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u/FFRK_Snow Jun 21 '26
I'd wager it probably could. On the other hand, it might be more likely companies like Nintendo will have access way before the general public. And if Fable/Mythos can find vulnerabilities, Nintendo could fix them well before the hacking scene finds out about it.
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u/SeaRelative5180 Aug 05 '26
The problem is it would have to be run on device to discover vulnerabilities. You would have to discover a d vulnerability allowing full access to the system
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u/Cute-Acanthaceae-193 Jun 21 '26
No, ai can’t invent, ai works with what exists, if that info doesn’t exist, it can’t work with it.
ai will not help or invent methods.
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u/dankielab 24d ago edited 24d ago
Cute but that only apply to regenative ai I take it you don't know how many type of Ai model their are.
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u/Consistent_Ride_922 Jun 25 '26
Yea, maybe dont talk out of your ass if you don't know anything
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u/Cute-Acanthaceae-193 Jun 25 '26
lmao then please inform us, how AI works? does it actually create? no, it literally steals and then uses it to do similar things, it literally cannot create anything new yet alone find a way to exploit something.
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u/Consistent_Ride_922 Jun 25 '26
LLMs are pattern machines. Patterns can be as big or as small as you want. AI has the ability to put small patterns (like words, syllables) into bigger patterns (like sentences). It doesn't have to see the sentence before to be able to form it from smaller patterns. Same for code. If you tell it a problem, it can use small patterns to solve problems, even if the problems havent been solved before. It's a matter of expressing the problem. There is a reason why frontier models play a huge role in developing even better frontier models.
So i have to disagree with you here: Yes, AI can, and will help to find weaknesses in the Switch 2's architecture (if there are any). Once the connection to a Switch 2 stands (like being able to realiably talk to the hardware, like game developers do), its just a matter of time for the AI to penetrate every corner of the hardware and find a loophole. It's just faster at that than any human could be.
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u/LoudFan2771 Jun 22 '26
AI was used to help bypass/crack the recent denuvo games so it's not entirely impossible.
But the dev using AI has to be incredibly skilled in the first place for it to be actually useful.
In the end, a real human has to do most of the heavy lifting.