Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss' • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#101

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

nerdsniper wrote: post #98

mike_hearn wrote: post #91

Amazing talk. Here's a quick writeup if you don't want to watch the full hour or don't have enough hardware knowledge to follow what Markus is talking about, as he goes very fast, in some cases too fast to even let you read the text on his slides. It's mandatory to use the pause key to understand the full details even if you have a deep understanding of every relevant technology, of which he explains none. The Xbox u…

Thank you, sincerely. My main question now is, what degree of repeatability has Markus achieved so far?

On Phat consoles? You could turn it into a modchip, if for some reason you wanted to. It'd be repeatable on every boot but might take a while.

The hard work comes after this though. There are lots of software level mitigations MS could use to keep the old devices usable with Xbox Live if they really wanted to. Just because you can boot anything you want doesn't mean you can't be detected remotely, it just makes it harder for MS to do so reliably. You'd be in a constant game of catch-up.

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#102

Post by ziml77 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

SteveNuts wrote: post #62

babypuncher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Xbox is going to be a specialized PC running Windows with full access to third party game stores (Steam, Epic, etc). It won't need to be "hacked" because anyone will already be able to run any software they want on it.

What is the point of a device like this if the only difference is form factor? Why wouldn't someone just buy a pre-configured gaming PC?

If this is true then the reason that a console would be better than a custom PC is that it would also be designed to work better for that purpose. Turning on the device when the controller turns on and sending CEC commands are two huge things that aren't well supported outside of the console space. Also it would likely run a trimmed down version of Windows and would be set up to "just work" in a way that a system that can have any arbitrary set of hardware will never be able to do.

But the really nice thing about the concept of treating a PC and console as the same platform is that you don't have to worry about why people might prefer to go the route of buying the console. You can go with a regular gaming PC if that's what you prefer and your library will have all the same options.

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#103

Post by aservus » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

xbox is always trying to limit the users, when a person buys something, he clearly gets the ownership of the thing yet companies nowadays are trying really hard to sell some subscription while giving the illusion that the owner of the product is in control all the while keeping him in control. is there anyone else who feels the same way?

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#104

Post by genthree » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

SteveNuts wrote: post #62

babypuncher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Xbox is going to be a specialized PC running Windows with full access to third party game stores (Steam, Epic, etc). It won't need to be "hacked" because anyone will already be able to run any software they want on it.

What is the point of a device like this if the only difference is form factor? Why wouldn't someone just buy a pre-configured gaming PC?

Every PC I’ve ever tried to repurpose as a gaming console of any sort has had way more jank to it than I’d ever tolerate in a console, in the 25ish years I’ve been hooking computers up to TVs. Even the Bazzite box I’ve got is pretty bad by comparison. Hell, my actual Steam Deck has a lot more undesirable “enthusiast” behavior to it, let’s say, than I’d want out of a Nintendo product for example, even though it’s just about the best I’ve seen (the actual best is Retroarch with a skin mimicking the PS3’s menu, on a dedicated distro that could take it from cold boot to interactive in like three seconds flat even on an rpi2… but that won’t play actual modern PC games, just emulated consoles and such, so it’s not a fair comparison)

A common failure is the controllers. It’s hard to get a combo of OS stack, Bluetooth chip, and controller that Just Works like they do on consoles. Something always needs fiddling-with.

Video or audio out are also often a problem. Glitched audio or audio mode-switching, trouble switching video modes, screwed-up HDR, all kinds of stuff. Maybe fine on your monitor with headphones. Not fine on a TV or projector with 5.1+ audio receiver.

The UIs also bug out or crash more often, and usually aren’t that great at being a TV UI in the first place (even Steam IMO is worse than most consoles, as far as the Big Picture UI)

It also gives devs a stable target with a known market, which is nice for both the devs and the owners of the devices.

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#105

Post by gjsman-1000 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

giobox wrote: post #72

autoexec wrote: post #51

> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. And this explains why it's stayed unhacked so long. There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC. Pirates, cheaters, archivists, and hackers could just go there. Microsoft's b…

The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route. There's a great prese…

I've seen this argument, but I strongly suspect that it's a cope argument. "We couldn't get in... because... we didn't care to! Even though we've hacked literally every other object on the planet just because."

The proof in the pudding of this will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 reaches 2035 with no cracks. That's my prophecy; that this time around the cat actually will catch the mouse. Between NVIDIA's heavily revised glitch-resistant RISC-V security architecture and Nintendo's impeccable microkernel, there's nowhere left to hide. DRM may turn out to have been a very slow long battle to "victory," not a "this will always be defeated."

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#106

Post by tverbeure » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

ActorNightly wrote: post #80

btown wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell. This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really e…

Basically if someone has physical access to device, its game over. You can do things like efuses that basically brick devices if something gets accessed, but that becomes a matter of whether the attacker falls for the trap.

> Basically if someone has physical access to device, its game over.

It took more than a decade to exploit this vulnerability and even then there are fairly trivial countermeasures that could have been used to prevent it (and that are implemented in other platforms.)

Nothing is unhackable, but it requires a very peculiar definition of "game over".

(And as others have pointed out: only early versions of this Xbos One where vulnerable to this attack.)

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#107

Post by glenstein » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #51

> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. And this explains why it's stayed unhacked so long. There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC. Pirates, cheaters, archivists, and hackers could just go there. Microsoft's b…

>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended.

Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#108

Post by thebruce87m » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #43

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #8

Created a voltage drop that exactly occurred to be timed to the key comparison, then a spike at the continuation. Irl noop and forced execution control flow to effectively return true. B e a utiful

It's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell. This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really e…

The microcontrollers I worked on 15 years ago had low voltage detection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_detect

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#109

Post by glenstein » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #55

darknavi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assuming they continue making Xbox It sounds like that's the plan: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/11/project-helix-buildin...

The new Xbox is going to be a specialized PC running Windows with full access to third party game stores (Steam, Epic, etc). It won't need to be "hacked" because anyone will already be able to run any software they want on it.

A conversation for another day and I can't wait to have it, but something about this seems seriously doomed, because Steam already owns this lane, owns it well, and these days I think Linux is objectively the better desktop for most personal, PC-style use cases.

Windows stopped feeling like it meant PC a long time ago, and there's a major risk of the whole Xbox identity disappearing into the PC computing. Probably a conversation for another day but when everything is an Xbox, nothing is an Xbox, and when an Xbox is a PC it might as well be fading away Marty McFly style from our plane of existence.

I suppose what would really impress me is a Roku-style omnivore approach that gives a first class console-style experience and interface to Epic, Steam, Itch.io, GOG and of course Xbox.

Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

#110

Post by louhike » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #51

> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform. And this explains why it's stayed unhacked so long. There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC. Pirates, cheaters, archivists, and hackers could just go there. Microsoft's b…

One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.