Xbox Architecture
copetti.org
Xbox Architecture
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Xbox Architecture
#2Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/
> Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. We will first describe the Xbox security design goals and why it needs to guard against hardware attacks, followed by descriptions of the hardware and software architecture to keep the Xbox secure. This includes details about the custom SoC we built with AMD and how we addressed the fact that all data read from flash, the hard drive, and even DRAM cannot be trusted. We will also discuss the corresponding software changes we made to keep the system and the games secure.
Re: Xbox Architecture
#3Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…
Uh, I'm confused. The PS4 has been cracked. Jailbreaks exist. And yes, they enable piracy. But like any console that is still being actively supported/updated by the manufacturer, it requires a certain firmware version (or below).
Re: Xbox Architecture
#4Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…
Uh, I'm confused. The PS4 has been cracked. Jailbreaks exist. And yes, they enable piracy. But like any console that is still being actively supported/updated by the manufacturer, it requires a certain firmware version (or below).
None of the recent firmware have been cracked.
Re: Xbox Architecture
#5Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…
Uh, I'm confused. The PS4 has been cracked. Jailbreaks exist. And yes, they enable piracy. But like any console that is still being actively supported/updated by the manufacturer, it requires a certain firmware version (or below).
Yes. The talk was given by an xbox architect, and iirc he mentions he's not sure about the state of the PS4. It's a great talk and if you're interested in security you should give it a watch.
Re: Xbox Architecture
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, I'm confused. The PS4 has been cracked. Jailbreaks exist. And yes, they enable piracy. But like any console that is still being actively supported/updated by the manufacturer, it requires a certain firmware version (or below).
None of the recent firmware have been cracked.
But the PS4 has been cracked. Newest firmware or not is a bit irrelevant. Once Sony stops supporting the PS4, we're going to see the latest firmware get cracked too. That's usually how it goes. There are a number of private exploits going up to 7.00 (and possibly higher).
For fuck's sake, stop downvoting. Stupid assholes.
> Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy.
The PS4 has been cracked to enable piracy. That's a fucking fact. I can literally go on Ebay right now and buy myself a hackable PS4 and download a bunch of games and go nuts. So you guys can go eat shit.
Re: Xbox Architecture
#7Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…
Well this is false.
But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a customer when I was pirating, only an unpaid evangelist of the franchise.
Re: Xbox Architecture
#8I'm just looking at the motherboard layout at the very top of the article, and it's really strange to my non-expert eyes. The CPU is off to one side, and the GPU is the thing in the middle. And the SDRAM is all split up and far away from the CPU! Is this some sort of game-console specific thing?
Re: Xbox Architecture
#9Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…
Well this is false. But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a custo…
It’s still hard to beat “free”
Re: Xbox Architecture
#10I'm just looking at the motherboard layout at the very top of the article, and it's really strange to my non-expert eyes. The CPU is off to one side, and the GPU is the thing in the middle. And the SDRAM is all split up and far away from the CPU! Is this some sort of game-console specific thing?
It looks like the CPU and GPU are really close, which makes sense because it looks like there's a ton of pins shared between the two.
Ultimately designing a circuit board layout is an optimization problem. You usually have some constraints, like how close chips can be before they start interfering with each other magnetically, where the I/O will be, and where you need holes to mount the board. Then you either try to be a pathing optimizer yourself or you run a program that will layout your board for you.
I'm not sure about the XBox, but game consoles sometimes have faster Memory->GPU pipelines than normal PCs to speed up render times, which might be why the GPU is the most central component.