Researcher Sammy Hajhamid has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Nintendo Switch 2, achieving userland access that permits the execution of homebrew software and the reverse engineering of games. The exploit grants the ability to back up save files and access most of the console's peripherals through MMIO. The hack relies on the original Switch version of SmileBasic 4, a programming environment and interpreter that runs on Nintendo hardware.
The so-called tethered method requires a macOS or Linux PC connected to the same network to run a node.js package, which facilitates privileged system access. Hajhamid utilized OpenAI's Codex to analyze SmileBasic's language interpreter, employing a custom harness that sent USB commands to the system and monitored results via HDMI. The setup also included power cycling capabilities through a Bluetooth light switch flipping device.
After approximately two weeks of effort, the harness identified a 32-bit integer overflow triggered when removing items from an array in SmileBasic. This error exposes an array pointer, which subsequently allows read and write access to portions of system memory.