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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

eaton-works.com

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

#81

Post by JohnBooty »

0x457 wrote: post #63
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.

    Drives MS was selling had _plenty_ of margin. Which is why MS went that way
Maybe? It's hard to say. The linked article comparing the price of MS's HDD accessory to the cost of a contemporary OEM hard drive via NewEgg and yeah, MS's HDD was way more expensive per GB.

There are a lot of extra costs for MS though. Maintaining a separate SKU. Retail packaging. Cost of unsold units. Negotiating a supply of HDDs from e.g. WD which had to keep a production line or whatever open for that model when they otherwise might have phased it out sooner. The plastic enclosures. Etc.

Some of the price/GB differential may well have been gouging but some of it was also certainly overheads such as those I mentioned. There was zero possibility MS's retail Xbox360 HDDs could have been priced identically to the ever fluctuating price of HDDs from the direct sales channel. For a start, how could they reprice the units they'd already sold to WalMart, EBGames, and the like?

My strong hunch is that those official MS HDD's were not very profitable for MS. Otherwise one suspects they would not have tolerated hacked HDDs.

Of course if you want to say their whole strategy was dumb, I agree. Why not just allow consumers to slap the SATA drive of their choice into the 360? Bigger drives = more room for games = customers theoretically buying more games.

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

#82

Post by imadr »

fredoralive wrote: post #64
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).

If everything is verified locally couldn't you also change the firmeware verification key, and whatever verifies the firmware verification..etc ? Isn't it turtles all the way down?

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

#83

Post by nottorp »

Why would they care if my hard drive is genuine?

For the PS3, PS4 and PS5 i just bought a hard drive (ssd for the ps5) matching their specs, installed it inside and gamed on.

For the xbox you have to buy hard drives from Microsoft?

Edit: please don't tell me about usb drives hanging off your console. I don't like stuff hanging off my console.

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

#84

Post by meibo »

nottorp wrote: post #83

Why would they care if my hard drive is genuine? For the PS3, PS4 and PS5 i just bought a hard drive (ssd for the ps5) matching their specs, installed it inside and gamed on. For the xbox you have to buy hard drives from Microsoft? Edit: please don't tell me about usb drives hanging off your console. I don't like stuff hanging off my console.

The article leads with this, the drives from Microsoft had a massive upcharge compared to regular HDD rates at the time. They were making a pretty penny with these.

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

#85

Post by stefan_ »

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…

This was not a security feature at all, it wasn't securing anything? This is purely a feature to allow Microsoft to resell hard drives at 3x the price.

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

#86

Post by deely3 »

everyone wrote: post #2

I will never understand why people buy that locked down, proprietary, DRM infested shit (gaming consoles, "smart" appliances, smartphones, apple stuff etc.) in the first place. .. I would rather have nothing.

What model of phone your using? Tv? Laptop? Bank card? Car? All these stuff contains "locked down" or "proprietary" or "DRM infested" shit.

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

#87

Post by izacus »

imadr wrote: post #82
fredoralive wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If everything is verified locally couldn't you also change the firmeware verification key, and whatever verifies the firmware verification..etc ? Isn't it turtles all the way down?

The Xbox 360 security is a lot of turtles and the last turtle is actually baked into the SoC itself so it's impossible to modify. That firmware verifies the next stage and establishes the chain of verification that's very hard to break.

It did get broken eventually (after years of trying!) by figuring out that the CPU stops being reliable at very low clocks, but it was not even remotely easy.

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

#88

Post by izacus »

LesZedCB wrote: post #10

stuff like this is outrageous. i got a steam deck a few weeks ago and decided to grab the base model and an $80 512GB NVMe drive on newegg. the install was easy and i saved a ton of money. that's how hardware should work, especially stuff as easy as drives/RAM.

Steam Deck is pretty much the spiritual opposite of everything the console makers and the DRM industry stands for. I'm just waiting for big DRM publishers to start blocking it with excuse of poor DRM security and lockout.

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

#89

Post by progbits »

I couldn't find what is the size of the RSA key used. Any chance it is small enough to be broken today with bunch of cloud instances and few $100 [1] to spare? It was almost 20 years after all.

Of course cloning another disk is simpler and more practical, but it might be fun to eg. have custom logos on unmodded console.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/break...

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

#90

Post by favorited »

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

> a disk is the only thing that “regularly” fail

You must not be familiar with Xbox 360 failure rates. The solder in your GPU was going to fail long before the hard drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

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