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

tomshardware.com

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

#31

Post by jamesgeck0 »

tetrisgm wrote: post #9

This is great news. Hopefully this opens the floodgates towards emulation and homebrew. Not that there are really any exclusives, but it would be interesting.

Xbox One homebrew has effectively always been supported. Anyone can register a development account and boot the system into dev mode. IIRC in a talk about console security, a Microsoft developer noted that this was an intentional deterrent against hacking. An effort to split the community so that pirates and homebrew enthusiasts wouldn't have a reason to collaborate.

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

#32

Post by jamesgeck0 »

au8er wrote: post #25

This just again shows that given enough time skill, and resources, any security is pointless if the attacker has physical access to the device.

One of the DRM circumvention methods for the Xbox 360 involved precision drilling a specific depth into one of the chips on the board. Microsoft was very aware of the nature of physical access while designing this, haha.

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

#33

Post by inetknght »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #24
mikkupikku wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's like calling a ship "unsinkable". Yes, you engineered it to not sink, in accordance with strict maritime standards no doubt, but just don't call it unsinkable. If you call it unsinkable you're just begging for a century of snickering at your hubris.

It has no relation to hubris whatsoever if the "unhackable" label is not something self-proclaimed at launch but something descriptively applied by other people who were unable to hack it. Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

> Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

Pedantic: I'm sure somebody would have snickered about "unsinkable" if the Titanic sank after 10 years. Pragmatic: if the "unsinkable" Titanic lasted 10 years (or at least to profitability) before being sunk by people intending to sink it, that might certainly count as being "unsinkable" for the time it hadn't sunk.

Hubris: Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable before it was launched.

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

devmor wrote: post #18
joe_mamba wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would take statements in relative terms along with the whole context before attempting to refute them with a quick gotcha in absolute terms. Obviously nothing is ever unhackable, not even Fort Knox, given infinite time and resources, and Microsoft never made such claims, this is just media editorializing for clicks and HN eating the bait, but Xbox One was definitely the most unhackable console of its ge…

> Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack it. Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles? I'm not very familiar with the Xbox scene, but I would assume that there was a lot less drive to achieve this given that Xbox has never really had many big exclusive titles and remains the least popular major console (with an abysmally tiny market presence outside of…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by Brian_K_White »

WJW wrote: post #11
Arainach wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it held up against 13 years of dedicated efforts by people with physical access to the device, many years after its successor was launched, it seems merited in this case. This talk about some of what went into it is fascinating: https://youtu.be/quLa6kzzra0

It literally got hacked, that's what the article is about. It is NOT unhackable.

It was unhackable while it mattered. It was hacked 5 years after it no longer mattered. And all but the effectively beta release remain unhacked even now.

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

#37

Post by deadbeef7f »

devmor wrote: post #18
joe_mamba wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would take statements in relative terms along with the whole context before attempting to refute them with a quick gotcha in absolute terms. Obviously nothing is ever unhackable, not even Fort Knox, given infinite time and resources, and Microsoft never made such claims, this is just media editorializing for clicks and HN eating the bait, but Xbox One was definitely the most unhackable console of its ge…

> Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack it. Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles? I'm not very familiar with the Xbox scene, but I would assume that there was a lot less drive to achieve this given that Xbox has never really had many big exclusive titles and remains the least popular major console (with an abysmally tiny market presence outside of…

> Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles?

The person who hacked the original Xbox wrote a book on the topic, which they've since made free: https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

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

#38

Post by landr0id »

charcircuit wrote: post #14

It wasn't unhackable and decrypted versions of games already have been dumped. There was even a public exploit published years ago. https://github.com/exploits-forsale/collateral-damage What's new here is that this compromises the entire system security giving access to the highest privilege level.

Thanks for the mention! I helped with the collateral damage exploit (wrote the PE loader).

I didn't ask but Emma -- who wrote the kernel-mode exploit -- and I would probably agree that Collat is not really what we would consider a proper hack of the console since it didn't compromise HostOS. Neither of us really expected game plaintext to be accessible from SRA mode though.

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

#39

Post by Waterluvian »

au8er wrote: post #25

This just again shows that given enough time skill, and resources, any security is pointless if the attacker has physical access to the device.

I think this might be a good example of the fundamental misunderstanding of what "security" even is. It is never a binary state. Never was. And I think a lot of people don't really grok that and think that if a security block can be overcome in some manner then the thing is not secure.

Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.

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

#40

Post by darknavi »

nxc18 wrote: post #7

I think it counts as effectively unhackable since it remained unhacked until five and a half years after its successor went on the market. I wonder if, assuming they continue making Xbox, they find a way to mitigate this in the next generation.

> assuming they continue making Xbox

It sounds like that's the plan:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/11/project-helix-buildin...

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