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Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
231–240 of 311 posts
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
at some point it was claimed that the reason sony removed the ability to run linux was because, literally, Saddam Hussein (maybe not) was using them to pilot jets or somesuch.
I haven't looked, but I am pretty sure that Saddam was dead before the ps3 launched. At the very least, his 2003/2004 ouster was before the ca 2007ish (I think) launch date.
Ok, I looked it up; Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006 and the ps3 launched on Nov 11, 2006 in Japan and Nov 17, 2006 in the US. So, technically, he was alive for the launch.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#233[dead]
"more technical"... funny, after watching that video...
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#234So, they are spending like billions and they are the top tech company in the world, still not able to make a thing unhackable?
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#235It had those e-fuses in it right? *Seriously* it should be illegal to sell anything with those.
Basically all computers use efuses, otherwise it would be possible to rollback the firmware to a previous, insecure version. For something like a game console, that’s annoying, for a phone or laptop, that’s highly desirable if something like a TPM bug is fixed, without efuses the system would forever be vulnerable.
What a huge sin. God forbid I could install whatever the version I want on the device I paid for.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#236The "unhackable" label has always been a liability, not a feature. In my experience, the moment a vendor publicly declares something unbreakable, they've handed researchers the most compelling motivation possible. It's less a security posture and more a recruitment poster.
Hardware you own should be yours to understand.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#237Earlier 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…
The microcontrollers I worked on 15 years ago had low voltage detection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_detect
Glitching attacks are typically performed by switching the supply voltage at quite high frequencies, a typical low-voltage detection won't trigger a reset under such conditions. And this is also why glitching attacks are often performed by spiking higher voltages, not lower. See for example Joe Grant's latest video on breaking crypto wallets [0].
Low-voltage detection is usually implemented as simple comparator which should trigger instantly, but often only on a single Vcc pin, and due to the decoupling caps found on a typical circuit design there is effectively an RC circuit that filters short fluctuations of supply voltage. So most low-voltage detection implementations only trigger on 'longer' periods of low voltage.
Traditionally low-voltage detection features (like brown-out detection) are there to guarantee functionality of the uC itself or the device the uC controls. It is typically not intended as a defence measure against these types of attacks. In fact, 15 years ago it may not have been much of a concern.
Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#238One should never call something "unhackable" ...
In the very strict interpretation probably nothing is unhackable, just not hacked yet. But one should also be pragmatic about what "unhackable" means in context. Without the power of hindsight, a consumer device that stayed unhacked for ~13 years can be reasonably called unhackable during this time.
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Re: Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
#239So, they are spending like billions and they are the top tech company in the world, still not able to make a thing unhackable?
When there's physical access to the device it's nearly impossible to make any system unhackable I think, at least with current tech. In this case it's a deliberately injected (twice!) hardware fault, and requires intervention at the hardware-level to reproduce the privilege escalation.
Yeah Apple does have "secure enclave" on some devices, and maybe in many cases it would wipe itself before you got in, but maybe that just means a more careful-hand is needed? (Again, physical access and extreme care/caution when debugging/investigating the chip should work eventually I think!) - I am not a hardware hacker, just have read about it quite a bit!