51–60 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xbox Security Protocol. We liked to add X to things back then.
Since you branded it, did you use it in any other games by chance?
AFAIK, it persists to this day, extended with newer features (and crypto primitives).
Huge fan of Halo 1, and for me, the original (via LAN, XLAN or Xlink Kai) is still the preferred way to play compared to Halo MCC (RIP XBconnect). I dabble in map mods so this is mostly over my head, but interesting read. Don't know if would help your research: but are you aware of a mod/mappack called Halo 1: NHE (No Host Edition)? It's a hacky way of using a third box to host the system link game. http://halo1nhe.c…
This is officially my favorite thread on HN, ever. Just waiting for rothgar to show up, sorry @rothgar, I should've hit you up for some Halo while I was in Seattle (and the k8s space).
Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember,…
Nice work! Always fun to see something I wrote long ago reverse engineered. The packet format was indeed inspired by ESP over UDP, and I named it XSP. After system link shipped with the original launch of the console, I also worked on Xbox Live networking, including the client/server interactions and the design and implementation of the front-end Security Gateways that all Xboxes would talk to, first to authenticate…
Have you ever connected with the folks behind XBConnect?
Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember,…
You're speaking my language friend, and honestly half of this reads like I could have written it myself. I was obsessed with video games and knew I wanted to be a programmer before CE, but H1 on XBC, combined with LANs in high school and thousands of hours of split screen in college truly laid the passion for "how does all this work" and my current career.
I don't play CE as much, my doubles partner and I still hop on MCC every few months for a little nostalgia hit, but we're admittedly not the types that felt that Halo completely died after CE (although nothing ever felt as good after), so these days we generally play BTB Reach/H3, or 4s or Squad Battle on Infinite.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice! You did a great job on the protocol. Probably my only complaint on the XSP side of things is the fact that you have to do relatively complex parsing of the XSP packets before you can get to the point of verifying the signature of the packet. Seems like all of the corner cases were handled well in the implementation on the boxes, but as someone who does auth/cryptography in my day job, it kind of gives me the he…
That's a valid point about complex parsing. I remember being very concerned about adding unnecessary overhead to each packet during encapsulation. As for the SG, it primarily authenticated the Xbox machine account using Kerberos and then maintained a security association, accepted heartbeats, authenticated and decrypted incoming ESP-UDP packets into IP packets that it forwarded to the backend servers. Responses from…
There was a low level protocol allowing backends to get some extra metadata about a connection
Nice work! Always fun to see something I wrote long ago reverse engineered. The packet format was indeed inspired by ESP over UDP, and I named it XSP. After system link shipped with the original launch of the console, I also worked on Xbox Live networking, including the client/server interactions and the design and implementation of the front-end Security Gateways that all Xboxes would talk to, first to authenticate…
Huge fan of Halo 1, and for me, the original (via LAN, XLAN or Xlink Kai) is still the preferred way to play compared to Halo MCC (RIP XBconnect). I dabble in map mods so this is mostly over my head, but interesting read. Don't know if would help your research: but are you aware of a mod/mappack called Halo 1: NHE (No Host Edition)? It's a hacky way of using a third box to host the system link game. http://halo1nhe.c…
Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember,…
MCC launched in a terrible state, but it's had a crazy amount of deep improvements over the years and I think all of the big known issues of the original Halo PC port have been addressed since a few years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, I was initially surprised that they were encrypted but I can speculate on a few potential reasons: - The Xbox was designed to be able to play online via Xbox Live (e.g. with Halo 2 that came out later in 2004), and they might have simply reused the network stack for System Link over LAN. I looked a little bit at Halo 2 system link, it uses the same system calls from the kernel but the protocol seems to be mor…
From what I've heard from microsofties over beers, it was really the second one. They didn't expect developers to write network code in ~2001 that didn't have memory safety vulnerabilities and wanted a barrier there between simple overflows and system security.