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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'

#71

Post by joe_mamba »

scottyah wrote: post #41
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…

This goes against information theory as a whole, and the point of words. How are you going to convey all this extra context to people who don't follow the space, and what word(s) do we use for something that is actually unhackable? Literally unhackable? XD

Firstly, who made the claim that it was guaranteed to be "unhackable"? Was it Microsoft themselves when they sold it, or slop journalists looking to create false contrarianism in order to legitimize their own PoV and drive traffic to their articles? If it's the latter the we're just wasting our breath ehre over made up BS.

Secondly, this is HN, not some generic town corner shop newspaper. It's assumed the readers who come here often and comment with no green profiles, have at least some basic technical know-how that nothing is ever unbackable, least of all a console from 2103, and therefore process information through that context lens, instead of feigning complete ignorance and arguing from the false pretext they gobbled up from editorialized titles created by slop journalists.

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

#72

Post by giobox »

autoexec wrote: post #51

> 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 other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route.

There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features:

> https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode:

> https://xboxdevstore.github.io/

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

#73

Post by chocochunks »

bombcar wrote: post #64
autoexec wrote: post #51

> 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…

There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.

Most of what was done on an original modded Xbox can be done on a retail stock Xbox One/Xbox Series with the exception of pirated Xbox games. Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is just in the Xbox store, emulators and homebrew can be setup through dev mode with a little effort and $20. It's really just pirated versions of Halo 5 and a few others missing.

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

#75

Post by jolan »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53

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?

Tony Chen from Microsoft gave a talk called "Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story" and he explains that they want any sort of physical attack to cost at least the price of 10 games ($600 at the time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo&t=715s

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

#77

Post by mkipper »

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?

I'm not at all familiar with the Xbox One, but this is a feature that's generally available if you're designing "closed" hardware like a console. Most SoC these days have some sort of security processor that runs in its own little sandbox and can monitor different things that suggest tampering (e.g. temperatures, rail voltages, discrete tamper I/O) and take a corrective action. That might be as simple as resetting the chip, but often you can do more dramatic things like wiping security keys.

But this exploit shows that it's still almost impossible to protect yourself from motivated attackers with local access. All of that security stuff needs to get initialized by code that the SoC vendor puts in ROM, and if there's an exploit in that, you're hooped.

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

#78

Post by cortesoft »

mike_hearn wrote: post #63
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.

Seems unlikely. Someone would have to turn this into a modchip, set up physical distribution networks (all very illegal under the DMCA), and it'd only work on the 2013 machines - Chen's team clearly anticipated this type of attack and were already working on mitigations around the time the Phat released. So as he says at the end, later silicon already has more glitch mitigations built in and has done for a long time.…

I had a friend who ran a side business installing mod chips on the original Xbox in the early 2000s. There was a robust community around it, and you could buy chips easily.

This was all after the DMCA was in effect. I don’t think that will stop this sort of activity.

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

#79

Post by mitkebes »

SteveNuts wrote: post #62
babypuncher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the point of a device like this if the only difference is form factor? Why wouldn't someone just buy a pre-configured gaming PC?

The main goal is money, an Xbox branded windows PC has potential to drive sales.

Microsoft can also hopefully target a smoother user experience than a typical windows PC provides. They want this to be a valid console competitor, but just slapping xbox brand on a windows PC isn't enough to do that.

Having a first party hardware device to target for PC games can also help devs with having a clear performance target for PCs, similar to how the Steam Deck is currently a minimum spec performance target for a lot of games.

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

#80

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

Basically if someone has physical access to device, its game over.

You can do things like efuses that basically brick devices if something gets accessed, but that becomes a matter of whether the attacker falls for the trap.

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