This is great news. I’ve actually been spending my weekends learning how to modify my old 360 and play great games to relive some of those younger days, while my Series X gathers dust.
Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
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Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#142It had those e-fuses in it right? *Seriously* it should be illegal to sell anything with those.
E-fuses are just write once memory with limited reads ability 10e6-10e7 read cycles after which it becomes unreliable.
Secure boot that can't be controlled by the user should be illegal, though. You should get some secret code along with a device, that allows you as the buyer to tamper with it. So much hardware out there can just serve as something else, or can be supported by people on a voluntary basis, sans the completely arbitrary lockdown of ability to install your own code to the device.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
DCLS actually makes sense for this scenario as the fault tolerance gained from having three processors isn't needed here. The system can halt when there's a mismatch, it doesn't have to perform a vote and continue running if 2 of 3 are getting the same result.
Also I just thought of this but it should be possible to design a chip where the second processor runs a couple cycles behind the first one, with all the inputs and outputs stashed in fifos. This would basically make any power glitches affect the two CPUs differently and any disrepancies would be easily detected.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails The xbox does have defences against this, the talk explicitly mentions rail monitoring defences intended to detect that kind of attack. It had a lot of them, and he had to build around them. The exploit succeeds because he found two glitch points that bypassed the timing randomisation and containment model.
I hope Apple is paying attention, since their first gen AirTags are vulnerable to voltage glitching to disable the speaker and the tracking warning.
Isn't airtags completely and utterly broken, or has anything changed?
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#145Created 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…
Just so you know, hardware hackers have been doing this for 20+ years. Hacking satellite TV (google smart card glitching) was done the same way.
Its more that its really hard to do security when the attacker has unlimited physical access.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#146> 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…
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Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#147> 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 true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.
True, I'm not trying to diminish this guy's efforts to defeat all the obstacles MS put in his way.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.
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.
Linux on playstation was a play by Sony not to have customs like on a toy but as a more favorable computer merchandise. They didn't care.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#149> 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 sa…
I think they could have used some punctuation.
examples:
The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped, in better quality, on the PC platform.
The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped (in better quality) on the PC platform.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#150Earlier 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.
Linux on playstation was a play by Sony not to have customs like on a toy but as a more favorable computer merchandise. They didn't care.
Nope, that was with YA BASIC.