Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss' • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by autoexec » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

> 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 best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place

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

#52

Post by sabas123 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #43

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #8

Created 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…

> It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.

It is know as voltage glitching. If you're interested our research group applies to Intel CPUs. https://download.vusec.net/papers/microspark_uasc26.pdf

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

#53

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

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?

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

#54

Post by braunshedd » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #8

Created 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

The Xbox 360 was hacked in a simpler but nearly identical way [1]! Amazing that despite the various mitigations, the same process was enough to crack the Xbox One.

[1] https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox_360:RGH/RGH3

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

#55

Post by babypuncher » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

darknavi wrote: post #40

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...

The new Xbox is going to be a specialized PC running Windows with full access to third party game stores (Steam, Epic, etc). It won't need to be "hacked" because anyone will already be able to run any software they want on it.

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

#56

Post by echelon_musk » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #32

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.

I had many Xbox 360s with flashed DVD drive firmware back in the day. But as I never owned a slim console I had no idea the drill/Kamikaze hack was a thing until now.

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

#57

Post by leoc » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #28

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.

This seems like an unqualified win for the security measure. The future value of Xbox One DRM is probably close to zero. They already got what they wanted out of it.

At this point the blip of free media coverage possibly makes this a net positive for XBox.

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

#58

Post by johncolanduoni » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

phantom784 wrote: post #45

btown wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Could a chip detect this and reset?

Yes, and the Xbox One has mechanisms to do just that. But they turned out to not be fully sufficient.

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

#59

Post by protimewaster » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #31

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.

They did dumb things like limit memory availability in dev mode, though. Also they require a government ID to enable dev mode (but at least the quit charging $100 for it!). And they made it so you can't enable dev mode on consoles that are banned from Xbox services.

I understand it's still more than most console makers do, having dev mode at all, but it's maddening to me that Microsoft made dev mode so annoying and limited. I'd honestly just rather a hack be available so we have the option of using the entire memory or repurposing banned consoles.

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

#60

Post by Retr0id » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #8

Created 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

No? It is crowbar voltage glitching, but you're significantly underselling it here. The glitching does not affect key comparisons.

It's a double-glitch. The second glitch takes control of PC during a memcpy. The first glitch effectively disables the MMU by skipping initialization (allowing the second glitch to gain shellcode exec). (I am also skipping a lot of details here, the whole talk is worth a watch)