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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

#151

Post by Godel_unicode »

jiggawatts wrote: post #139
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…

To this day, there is significantly better security in your XBox account to protect your in-game collectables than can be achieved by huge enterprises trying to protect their corporate secrets on Microsoft 365. E.g.: the corporate default settings for MFA show zero additional information. Literally just an “accept” button. The XBox equivalent shows location, etc…

All of that is available in M365 though, it’s just off because many large IT departments optimize for ticket volume as opposed to quality or security.

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

#152

Post by DangitBobby »

Jerrrry wrote: post #68
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 "…

You have any more info on who this person is and what they were convicted of?

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

#153

Post by twoodfin »

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…

I’m assuming their “threat model” wasn’t individual users going through sophisticated hoops to install their own hard drives.

More likely they wanted to make it difficult for grey-market vendors of unauthorized disk drives to escape cease and desist orders from Microsoft’s army of lawyers.

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

#154

Post by IntelMiner »

aftbit wrote: post #148
psychphysic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this. Hacking was huge on the 360, as was piracy that JTAG thing using the cooler runner and browning out the processor after slowing it, there were multiple mod chips and finally the ODEs coming out the wazhoo. The funny thing about security is it's about the weakest links they find. So you can harden link A as much as you want if link B is a dud all the extra work on A was wasted energy. What's most imp…

> What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up! This applies to the whole early XBox story. Microsoft learns the right lessons... Sony learns the wrong ones. XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation. XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by ge…

FWIW the "PS3 is faster" is still debated to this day, mainly due to the Cell's "weird" architecture

If you remove the SPE's from the equation (which many developers did) the PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU, while the Xbox has a 3.2Ghz Triple Core (6 thread) PPC64

The extra threads aren't directly as useful as games back then were almost entirely single-threaded, a trend that has only begun to really change course in the last decade or so (partially due to the Xbone and PS4 having anemic Bulldozer derived CPU's that had weak single-thread performance)

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

#155

Post by userbinator »

anonymousiam wrote: post #105

This is the same sort of bullshit that HP has done with their computer hard drives, but with an even more elaborate lock-in by Microsoft in this case. The HP computers came with an OEM Windows CD so you could re-install the OS after replacing a bad hard drive, but if you chose to replace the hard drive with anything other than a "genuine" HP replacement part, the Windows installation would fail. Note that the HP repl…

Meanwhile, the pirate with cracked Windows has none of these problems.

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

#156

Post by transpute »

airstrike wrote: post #67
RandomBK wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There was a PSEC 2019 talk on Azure Sphere (IoT), with some details on Pluton security features and the Microsoft Linux hardened kernel based on OpenEmbedded/Yocto. Briefly mentioned is Microsoft's QEMU emulation of Pluton for CI/CD and their segmented architecture for delivery of 10 years of Linux security updates to the device, even if the IoT vendor goes out of business leaving the application firmware unmaintained.

https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/seay/ (click Hardware tag to seek video to the Pluton section)

IEEE paper (2021, paywall) on Pluton, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9512305

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

#157

Post by IntelMiner »

Jerrrry wrote: post #124
jcpham2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an xecuter mod on the first Xbox and a 2TB hard drive, you could do so many many things with Xbox Media Center on the very first Xbox - FTP your games over. TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. One of the greatest things about the 360 out of the box was it played popular video codecs directly from USB storage - unmodded! Unheard of at the time. I had an early model PSX console in high school and…

>TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. According to sources, a modified original Xbox running the latest XBMC was put on the center podium, was shown off, and the executives had ordered the engineers to "make the new xbox do this"...and it was.

The 360's early media capabilities were absolutely unheard of for the time

I was blown away when half way through the setup of my 360 my desktop running Vista helpfully chimed in saying it found the 360 and offered to let me stream all my MP3's right to it while playing games

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

#158

Post by ericpauley »

anonymousiam wrote: post #149
Gigachad wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole windows market has been an absolute dumpster fire lately. The "modern standby" issue is infuriating. In a year or two I think the Macbook might honestly be the best linux laptop you can buy. I've got Asahi set up on my M1 and it's borderline usable now. Just waiting on thunderbolt and power management to be done and I could work with this.

I would love to agree with you, were it not for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34504752 https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgybq7/apple-macbook-activat...

Without being deactivated these are effectively stolen devices. The sin here isn’t on apple, it’s on the previous owner failing to unlock the device. I’m all for this it it means my devices won’t be stolen.

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

#159

Post by userbinator »

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/

and many of these technologies are now showing up via Project Pluton.

More awareness needs to be made of how this will have a devestating impact on end-user freedom. They're attacking the PC, one of the last holdouts of general-purpose computing freedom. Remote attestation will make it so you "can" technically run your own hardware and software (and that's what the FUD-spreaders will always say), but you'll be denied access to lots of, increasingly online, services.

Edit: nice, downvotes. Hello corpo-authoritarians, we know what's up :-)

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

#160

Post by amalcon »

Gigachad wrote: post #137
amalcon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sold by arguably the largest DRM provider. Valve just seems think of DRM as a way to keep honest people honest, rather than as something that aspires to be unassailable.

It's a bit different. The Steam Deck is not locked down like consoles are. You can run anything you want on them. They then additionally allow game devs to use steam as DRM for individual games. But you are still free to run whatever software you want.

Right, it's very different than any other console. It's not particularly out of character for Valve, though, and they are definitely part of the DRM establishment.
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