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

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131–140 of 311 posts

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

#131

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…

Thanks for this writeup as I haven't had time to review the video yet :)

So, the only way to manipulate it is to actually screw with the internals of the CPU itself by "glitching", meaning tampering with the power supply to the chip at exactly the right moment to corrupt the state of the internal electronics. Glitching a processor has semi-random effects and you don't control what happens exactly, but sometimes you can get lucky and the CPU will skip instructions. By creating a device that reboots the machine over and over again, glitching each time, you can wait until one of those attempts gets lucky and makes a tiny mistake in the execution process.

Considering that the PSP is a small ARM processor that presumably takes up little die space, would it make sense for it to them employ TMR with three units in lockstep to detect these glitches? I really doubt that power supply tampering would cause the exact same effect in all three processors (especially if there are differences in their power circuitry to make this harder) and any disrepancies would be caught by the system.

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

#132
post #128

I wonder... if microsoft can't secure a gaming console which they have full control on, from top to bottom, how do they secure "Azure Government"?

When your hardware is in the physical custody of the attacker, the threat model changes significantly. Designing a console that takes years for attackers to crack is an impressive feat of engineering.

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

#133

> 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…

This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.

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

#134

Physical possession of a machine is pretty hard to make secure. It's a different level of secure, an order of magnitude less secure than remote attackers. This is expected?

Depends on the size of the system you need to secure.

If kilobytes of storage and very limited computing power works for your use case, you can get very secure (smartcards and secure elements remain essentially undefeated at the hardware level; all attacks I know happened via weak ciphers).

For an entire current-gen gaming console, you'll have a much harder time.

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

#135

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…

Thanks for this writeup as I haven't had time to review the video yet :) So, the only way to manipulate it is to actually screw with the internals of the CPU itself by "glitching", meaning tampering with the power supply to the chip at exactly the right moment to corrupt the state of the internal electronics. Glitching a processor has semi-random effects and you don't control what happens exactly, but sometimes you c…

The Nintendo switch 2 uses DCLS (Dual-core lockstep) in the BPMP and PSC (PSC is PSP-like but RISC-V). So yes, it helps - I'm unsure if/where msft uses it on their products.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point. Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.

How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.

They used to charge too but now it’s free. I got mine set up after about 30min of work a few weeks ago just need to actually load it up now. It’s tedious and you have to share your personal ID but it’s not difficult.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few exclusives. Couple of Forzas? Halo 5? Practically everything else available elsewhere in similar quality.

They are on PC afaik?

Forza Motorsport 5 & 6 and Halo 5: Guardians all Xbox One exclusives, I think.

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

#138
post #123
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles. Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.

The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.

I would be curious to know more precise numbers. My intuition suggests that when Sony sells millions of them, the number diverted for non-gaming purposes is maybe thousands or tens of thousands.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revise…

Well, and these systems are also designed with ratchet-type measures in place from the get-go, where holes are plugged, fuses are burned, and newly released titles will only decrypt/run on the latest OS. So even if Switch 2 doesn't make it all the way to 2035 with zero cracks, there's a strong likelihood that any exploits found will be short-lived.

Which incentivizes people to hold on to exploits for as long as possible, ideally past the console life cycle, just to make sure it can be used, which already is a thing
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