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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

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Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#61

Post by EMIRELADERO »

kevingadd wrote: post #59
cheeseomlit wrote: post #55

[flagged]

People want these kind of security measures when they buy a game console, because the alternative is easily-modded consoles that people use to cheat in online games. Lots of online games are also not well engineered so cheating can cause crashes and save corruption - for example, modders constantly find bugs in GTA V that can be used to crash GTA Online sessions or even crash single-player sessions where you're playi…

I would prefer that platforms are fully open because it would force game studios and app developers to implement good security that doesn't rely on the client being unhackable.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#62

Post by RandomBK »

jchw wrote: post #56

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a grea…

Every time I hear about the XBox's platform security, I think back to this talk [1] about how Microsoft protected the XBox One. A lot of it boils down to clear requirements and good engineering, and many of these technologies are now showing up via Project Pluton.

[1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#63

Post by 0x457 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #19

Of all components, a disk is the only thing that “regularly” fail, that become too small, and have no other security impact, no profit margin (I think) It’s idiotic MS took this route. And what’s the downside/risk for MS? Nothing.. if the Xbox doesn’t work anymore, just don’t give any support on that disk

Margins are low on retail drives. Drives MS was selling had _plenty_ of margin. Which is why MS went that way. Also, this saves you from "I bought shitty drive from NoName on alibaba and it doesn't work" support requests.

Still stupid though. Glad Sony out of all companies opened up PS3 they way they did.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#64

Post by fredoralive »

imadr wrote: post #57

The articles says that the security sector is RSA-signed using a private key only Microsoft possesses, what if you also change the public key used for verification that is stored in the console?

You’d need Microsoft’s private key to sign the system firmware with a changed HDD verification public key in it (or an exploit undermining the general security chain of the system).

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#65

Post by AceJohnny2 »

imadr wrote: post #57

The articles says that the security sector is RSA-signed using a private key only Microsoft possesses, what if you also change the public key used for verification that is stored in the console?

At that level you're already hacking the console firmware. Easier then to just patch out the check as they've done.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#66

Post by jbverschoor »

jaywalk wrote: post #34
jbverschoor wrote: post #19

Of all components, a disk is the only thing that “regularly” fail, that become too small, and have no other security impact, no profit margin (I think) It’s idiotic MS took this route. And what’s the downside/risk for MS? Nothing.. if the Xbox doesn’t work anymore, just don’t give any support on that disk

No profit margin? What? They were making a massive profit off the hard drives, and this security was meant to preserve those profits.

Not using an Xbox.. I didn’t know they sell storage upgrades.

That’s pretty toxic

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#67

Post by airstrike »

RandomBK wrote: post #62
jchw wrote: post #56

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a grea…

Every time I hear about the XBox's platform security, I think back to this talk [1] about how Microsoft protected the XBox One. A lot of it boils down to clear requirements and good engineering, and many of these technologies are now showing up via Project Pluton. [1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

This is what I found on "Project Pluton" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2020/11/17/mee...

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#68

Post by Jerrrry »

jchw wrote: post #56

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a grea…

>their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them.

dude. The irony. They bricked our machines and joked about it. They had a fellowship with the FBI.

They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail.

Their own Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement page still brags about "pwning the pwnrs" - to this day.

Make no mistake, MS and Xbox still hate us. It's just from a capitalist perspective, its hard to compete with losing PC audience.

Their only selling point is itself, an unhackable console.

They did have restraint. There is a list of console ID's hardcoded in every NAND because originally a few souls had reversed the NAND enough to RSA-sign CON files - they were just gonna ban everyone who had made modified content, but didnt... because of Halo3's File Share incidentally preserving personal RSA keys, making it difficult to reconcile modified content, once spread.

Regarding hacked DVD drives....they did the math and banned millions when it was profitable, ironically.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#69

Post by kmeisthax »

morcheeba wrote: post #24
nywles wrote: post #15

May the logo have been included so that the security sector could not be distributed under copyright law?

That was a tactic Nintendo used with the gameboy. The courts eventually decided that the logo, when used as an access token like that, no longer qualified for the creative component required for copyright protection.

Strictly speaking, the logo bit wasn't about copyright, but trademark. Specifically there was certain territories that Japan had trademark treaties with, but not copyright treaties. Taiwan if I remember correctly.

So you could legally make unlicensed copies of Super Mario Bros but they couldn't be called Super Mario Bros. This is why a lot of old bootleg games change the titlescreen to say, say, "7 GRAND DAD[0]" instead of "Super Mario Bros". This behavior actually seems to persist to the present day despite these copyright loopholes having long since been fixed.

Of course there were companies that got around the logo check with custom hardware[1]. And Nintendo themselves got lazy and didn't check the whole logo on the Color. So it's possible to change the boot logo on basically every Game Boy.

The court case you're thinking of has to do with SEGA's Trademark Security System (TMSS) for the Genesis. Sega v. Accolade to be specific. The broad strokes are similar, though - small bits of copying to sell an original unlicensed work are acceptable because console hardware is not copyrightable just because you worked on it real hard.

[0] Fleenstones? Aaaaugh...

[1] The Game Boy BIOS has a TOCTOU bug. AFAIK this is also how Argonaut Software managed to get an in with Nintendo to publish X in Japan.

Re: How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

#70

Post by Jerrrry »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #61
kevingadd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want these kind of security measures when they buy a game console, because the alternative is easily-modded consoles that people use to cheat in online games. Lots of online games are also not well engineered so cheating can cause crashes and save corruption - for example, modders constantly find bugs in GTA V that can be used to crash GTA Online sessions or even crash single-player sessions where you're playi…

I would prefer that platforms are fully open because it would force game studios and app developers to implement good security that doesn't rely on the client being unhackable.

so you want an unhackable, but fully open, client.

zero sense.

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