A security researcher has shown that a software‑only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2 is possible, granting “userland” access that “lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access most of the Switch 2’s peripherals through MMIO.”
The exploit builds on SmileBasic 4, the latest entry in a series of programming environments that run on Nintendo hardware. The so‑called tethered hack also requires a macOS or Linux computer on the same network to run a node.js package that helps obtain privileged system access.
Researcher Sammy Hajhamid says he used OpenAI’s Codex to probe the SmileBasic interpreter, employing a custom harness that could issue USB commands to the console and display results via HDMI, while also power‑cycling the device with a Bluetooth‑controlled light switch. After roughly two weeks of work, the harness identified a 32‑bit integer overflow that occurs when items are removed from an array in SmileBasic. The overflow exposes an array pointer, which in turn provides read and write access to portions of the system’s memory.