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

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/microsofts-unhackable-xbox-one-has-been-hacked-by-bliss-the-2013-console-finally-fell-to-voltage-glitching-allowing-the-loading-of-unsigned-code-at-every-level

by crtasm • 4 months ago

802 285 4 months ago

tomshardware.com

Simulacra• 4 months ago

One should never call something "unhackable" ...

Arainach• 4 months ago

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

WJW• 4 months ago

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

devmor6• 4 months ago

"Extremely hard to hack" or "Hackable only after it's retired" don't exactly roll off the tongue, but they are not synonymous with "Unhackable".

In many cases the truth is simply that its not worth the time/effort to hack it, so only the most dedicated perverts(with a positive connotation) keep trying.

joe_mamba4• 4 months ago

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 generation. Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack a 499$ consumer device from 2013. PS4 and iPhones of 2013 have also been jailbroken long ago.

Therefore, even the click-bait statement with context in relative terms is 100% correct, it truly was unhackable during the time it was sold and relative to its peers of the time.

devmor6• 4 months ago

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 the US).

As an aside, I wonder if Microsoft's extra effort into securing the platform comes from their tighter partnership with media distributors/streaming platforms and their off-and-on demonstrated desire to position the Xbox as a home media center more than just a gaming console.

scottyah• 4 months ago

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

close04• 4 months ago

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.

mikkupikku• 4 months ago

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.

replooda• 4 months ago

We don't need to contribute to word inflation. There's "really hard," there's "nearly impossible," there's even "impossible – as far as we know." I don't think it shows a lack of pragmatism to assume a technological claim, made by a technology company, should't be taken at face value. On the contrary, I'd advise more pragmatism to anyone failing to disregard an "unhackable" claim made by Microsoft specially even after fixnum years without known exploits.

stinmpy• 4 months ago

Marcus used to work for Microsoft, in the MSRC. I wonder if he used insider knowledge for this hack.

Scaevolus• 4 months ago

Microsoft released a video that covers effectively all of the Xbox One security system, and it's referred to extensively in the talk. The specific methods of glitching don't require any insider knowledge.

ZiiS• 4 months ago

They also told everyone they added more anti glitching to later hardware revisions; which by the process of elimination tells everyone they thought this was possible. The whole initiative was a success when it gave them a year; an unqualified triumph when it gave them the whole generation; they really are not going to be to sad after 12 years.

nxc18• 4 months ago

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.

fredoralive• 4 months ago

The presentation notes that this hack currently only works with the first revision of silicon. Later variants have more protections, like some anti-glitching tech that wasn’t quite debugged for the early units being enabled for later runs, and further changes with the security / reset subsystems being split into two separate cores with revised consoles like the the One X. So these would be more of a challenge, even if there’s now an angle of attack to investigate.

darknavi• 4 months ago

assuming they continue making Xbox

It sounds like that's the plan:

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

babypuncher3• 4 months ago

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.

Jerrrrrrrry• 4 months ago

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

hedora• 4 months ago

The earliest example I know of for this is CLKSCREW, but security hardware (like for holding root CA private keys) was hardened against this stuff way before that attack.

Has anyone heard of notable earlier examples?

bri3d2• 4 months ago

In terms of fault injection as a security attack vector (vs. just a test vector, where it of course dates back to the beginning of computing) in general, satellite TV cards were attacked with clock glitching at least dating back into the 1990s, like the "unlooper" (1997). There were also numerous attacks against various software RSA implementations that relied on brownout or crowbar glitching like this - I found https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5412860 right off the bat but I remember using these techniques before then.

btown• 4 months ago

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 exciting exploits coming out here!

phantom784• 4 months ago

Could a chip detect this and reset?

msla2• 4 months ago

You can't. Console makers have these locked-down little systems with all the security they can economically justify... embedded in an arbitrarily-hostile environment created by people who have no need to economically justify anything. It's completely asymmetrical and the individual hackers hold most of the cards. There's no "this exploit is too bizarre" for people whose hobby is breaking consoles, and if even one of those bizarre exploits wins it's game over.

And if you predict the next dozen bizarre things someone might try, you both miss the thirteenth thing that's going to work and you make a console so over-engineered Sony can kick your ass just by mentioning the purchase price of their next console. ("$299", the number that echoed across E3.)

PUSH_AX• 4 months ago

how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails

The xbox does have defences against this, the talk explicitly mentions rail monitoring defences intended to detect that kind of attack. It had a lot of them, and he had to build around them. The exploit succeeds because he found two glitch points that bypassed the timing randomisation and containment model.

sabas123• 4 months ago

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

ActorNightly• 4 months ago

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.

_kidlike• 4 months ago

not a new vulnerability class.

Extremely impressive feat nonetheless!

bri3d2• 4 months ago

It's not new - fault injection as a vulnerability class has existed since the beginning of computing, as a security bypass mechanism (clock glitching) since at least the 1990s, and crowbar voltage glitching like this has been widespread since at least the early 2000s. It's extraordinarily hard to defend against but mitigations are also improving rapidly; for example this attack only works on early Xbox One revisions where more advanced glitch protection wasn't enabled (although the author speculates that since the glitch protection can be disabled via software / a fuse state, one could glitch out the glitch protection).

thebruce87m• 4 months ago

The microcontrollers I worked on 15 years ago had low voltage detection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-voltage_detect

mox1• 4 months ago

Just so you know, hardware hackers have been doing this for 20+ years. Hacking satellite TV (google smart card glitching) was done the same way.

Its more that its really hard to do security when the attacker has unlimited physical access.

stinkbeetle• 4 months ago

Voltage glitching is an old technique. Here's a paper about it from 2 decades ago https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1708651 but it is at least another decade older as an attack vector.

Defend against it one way by voltage monitoring or physical intrusion detection, and another way by droop and such detection and countermeasures on the device. Both probably just increase the cost of hacking it by some orders of magnitude, but that may be enough.

pocksuppet• 4 months ago

This is a cat-and-mouse that can always be won by a sufficiently advanced cat. Whatever protection circuit you design, the attacker can decap the chip, put a wire on the right node in that circuit and force it to disabled. But that's really really hard, and most cats can't do it.

It's reassuring that the owner of a device will always own it, in the end.

braunshedd• 4 months ago

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

mywittyname4• 4 months ago

But it took them 4x as long to be successful against the xbone.

I think the security team would call their mitigations a success.

Retr0id6• 4 months ago

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)

platevoltage2• 4 months ago

This sounds like a way less crude version of the way many unlicensed NES cartridges got around the lockout chip. Just charge a capacitor and blast it at boot time.

tetrisgm2• 4 months ago

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.

whalesalad• 4 months ago

I'm just excited at the opportunity to re-purpose my old launch day XBone as some kind of little homelab linux box.

jamesgeck02• 4 months ago

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.

protimewaster• 4 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 4 months ago

Very few exclusives. Couple of Forzas? Halo 5? Practically everything else available elsewhere in similar quality.

tetrisgm2• 4 months ago

They are on PC afaik?

farmerbb• 4 months ago

Rare Replay is another exclusive that comes to mind.

ChoGGi2• 4 months ago

360 emulation?

mike_hearn6• 4 months ago

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. Current gen Xbox isn't even investigated but we can assume it's even harder. They were clearly paying for red teaming. Remember: ZERO software bugs in the boot rom.

cortesoft• 4 months ago

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.

charcircuit• 4 months ago

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.

landr0id2• 4 months ago

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.

landr0id2• 4 months ago

And the plaintext stuff by the way was a great effort by some other folks running https://xboxoneresearch.github.io/

I think it was tuxuser, Torus, and Billy(?) who accomplished that. Hopefully not forgetting anyone critical.

tencentshill• 4 months ago

Note this only affects the very first original 2013 "VCR" hardware. Newer revisions and variants are still unaffected.

dlcarrier• 4 months ago

They're pretty common and cheap on the used market, though. I bought mine from a thrifts store for $30, and the console itself regularly goes for ~$50 on eBay.

lionkor• 4 months ago

Is there any better format article or writeup? I couldn't find anything.

au8er• 4 months ago

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

wat10000• 4 months ago

I’m pretty skeptical of that lesson. This took 13 years and it’s cheap mass-market hardware.

recursive• 4 months ago

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.

leoc2• 4 months ago

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

jamesgeck02• 4 months ago

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.

echelon_musk2• 4 months ago

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.

zbentley• 4 months ago

Oh man, I remember the kamikaze hack. I was so chuffed when it worked; I felt like a brain surgeon for a moment.

dist-epoch• 4 months ago

You do have a credit card, right?

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

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.

tosti• 4 months ago

I see security as a stopgap measure when there's no peace. The best "security" is not to need any in the first place.

iso-logi• 4 months ago

I never hear about Grok being used over Codex or Claude on this site, I don't really hear about new Grok models or updates yet people love using Grok as a way to communicate meaning, are you guys just on Twitter too much?

cocoto2• 4 months ago

I can give you a piece of paper with a one time pad encoded secret, where the one time is physically destroyed. You can take all the time you want but you will not crack anything…

TobTobXX2• 4 months ago

You don't need to attack the math, if you can attack the sender or thr receiver ['s hardware].

john_strinlai• 4 months ago

i find this statement is often used as an excuse to not think about security at all. which is probably not what you intended here (i hope, although you did say "pointless"...), but some people parrot it for that purpose.

a) this was a security win. millions and millions of people had physical access to the device for over a decade

b) as others have said, security is not all-or-nothing. the xbox one is extremely secure, despite not being perfectly secure.

c) just because something eventually gets hacked does not mean security was pointless. delaying access is a perfectly reasonable security goal. delaying access until the product is retired and the successor is already out on the market is a huge win.

babypuncher3• 4 months ago

'pointless' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This console went completely unhacked for 12 years, with this coming a solid 4 years after the hardware was discontinued. They kept piracy off the console for its whole lifespan, which was the entire point of these security measures. This is a massive success for the Xbox security team.

jamesnorden• 4 months ago

Better stop locking your doors, then.

rangestransform• 4 months ago

In the talk that the security guy gave, he said it just had to cost more than 10 games for a user to enable piracy

Cthulhu_3• 4 months ago

I suppose, but I'd argue it's effective security if it took ten years.

autoexec3• 4 months ago

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

bombcar• 4 months ago

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.

chocochunks2• 4 months ago

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.

jerf• 4 months ago

I know that's been dropping my level of interest for hacking consoles farther and farther. Why hack a console when it has almost no exclusives, even fewer of which I personally care about, and having a real computer hooked to a TV is no longer weird or difficult? I could fight to put an emulator on some locked down console or I can just install an emulator for almost everything ever made in like 10 minutes on my Steam Deck, so the choice is pretty obvious.

giobox2• 4 months ago

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/

philistine3• 4 months ago

You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.

gjsman-10003• 4 months ago

I've seen this argument, but I strongly suspect that it's a cope argument. "We couldn't get in... because... we didn't care to! Even though we've hacked literally every other object on the planet just because."

The proof in the pudding of this will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 reaches 2035 with no cracks. That's my prophecy; that this time around the cat actually will catch the mouse. Between NVIDIA's heavily revised glitch-resistant RISC-V security architecture and Nintendo's impeccable microkernel, there's nowhere left to hide. DRM may turn out to have been a very slow long battle to "victory," not a "this will always be defeated."

phire• 4 months ago

I'm very much of the opinion that PS3's linux support massively delayed its exploitation. And not just because it provided a path for homebrew/linux.

A lot of the early hacking focused on trying to breach the hypervisor from otheros. The hypervisor turned out to be quite secure, people smashed their heads against it for years until it finally fell to a memory glitching attack.

But turns out it was so much easier to just attack gameos with a USB exploit. The hypervisor did nothing to prevent it, and would then just decrypt games for you (because gameos was trusted)

layoric• 4 months ago

"side loading", I know this term is the one used but I think should be pushed back against with just using the standard "installing"/"install". It makes the control point clearer and (should be) unsettling when you can't "install" software on hardware you own.

kotaKat• 4 months ago

Now if only Sony would let us even have a smidgen of our own code on our Playstations. But nope, Sony would rather gatekeep that one to Hell and back.

Instead, they keep stripping stuff off the console. I'm still so annoyed that PS5 doesn't even have an integrated web browser anymore (especially trying to troubleshoot network issues from the console itself).

But hey, Sony can leave bullshit exploit vectors open like PPPoE clients on the console itself (why? just use a router?)...

Forgeties793• 4 months ago

Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point.

Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.

genthree2• 4 months ago

How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.

mrandish• 4 months ago

I was vaguely aware this is possible although the "sign-up for a dev account and boot it in dev mode all the time", even if free, was still enough of a barrier that I haven't done yet. I'm hoping this hack eventually leads to a simpler "one-click" way to run emulation, home brew and mods while still maintaining full original game and media playing functionality.

Then I'll finally hook up the XBOne I have again and put it to some use on the downstairs TV. I already have a 'retired' PS4 filling similar role on the upstairs TV (although it must stay offline to remain 'liberated').

Retr0id6• 4 months ago

This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.

autoexec3• 4 months ago

True, I'm not trying to diminish this guy's efforts to defeat all the obstacles MS put in his way.

glenstein4• 4 months ago

The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended.

Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.

inertiatic• 4 months ago

It's clear it means that there's a large overlap in titles and they are available in better quality on the PC platform?

autoexec3• 4 months ago

I think they could have used some punctuation.

examples:

The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped, in better quality, on the PC platform.

The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped (in better quality) on the PC platform.

louhike• 4 months ago

One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.

pjmlp6• 4 months ago

It might be coming as per GDC news, lets see.

foobiekr• 4 months ago

the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.

zadikian• 4 months ago

Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.

genewitch10• 4 months ago

Helldivers 2 is cross platform (pc, sony, xbox all in same game at same time, doesn't matter who "hosts.") So it does exist in practice.

bor_real• 4 months ago

The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit.

Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before.

So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work.

Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps.

And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.

tzs• 4 months ago

The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine).

The parenthetical is not needed. It is OK to call Wine an emulator. The "Wine Is Not an Emulator" thing came about later and was essentially a marketing change. How it came about is interesting.

The first suggestion to change the meaning of the word from a shortening of "windows emulator to the not an emulator backronym was in 1993 over concern that "windows emulator" might run into problems with Microsoft trademarks, but no action was taken.

Over time the not an emulator usage became an accepted alternative. The Wine FAQ in late 1997 for example said:

  The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows
  Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right.
  Use whichever one you like best.

The release notes stopped calling it an emulator at the end of 1998. The 981108 release notes said:

  This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator.

The 981211 release notes said:

  This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of
  Windows on Unix.

As far as I have been able to tell from my recollections of that time and what I was able to find when I looked into it later is that this happened for two reasons.

1. Wine was useful for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. It could also be used as a library you could link with code compiled on Unix as an aide to porting Windows programs to Unix.

2. Hardware emulators that emulator old systems like GameBoy or Apple II had become popular. Many people were only familiar with that kind of emulator, and those (the emulators, not the people!) tended to be slow.

That was fine when your emulator is running on a machine with a clock speed 300x that of the machine you are emulating and that has a much more efficient CPU, but when you tried to use a hardware emulator for something comparable to your machine it was usually unbearably slow.

People only familiar with such hardware emulators might see Wine described as a Windows emulator and think it was doing hardware emulation and not even give it a try. By dropping calling it an emulator Wine sidestepped that problem.

Thaxll• 4 months ago

This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.

selectively4• 4 months ago

Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong here. The exact same people who thoroughly destroyed the 360 badly wanted to attack this system - they were just outgunned.

Gigachad2• 4 months ago

The security was way better with the Xbox One, but also no one cared about the Xbox one. The 360 was the last successful Xbox.

beAbU4• 4 months ago

There is this general vibe online that the newer generation xboxen are either bad, worse than playstation, or a straight up failure.

My series x, combined with gamepass, is by a very large margin the most at-home-entertainment bang I have gotten for my buck.

Before then I had what could be regarded as a "vintage" gaming PC: 1st gen i7 (nehalem?), a gts 450 and some amount of ram. An upgrade (read: full replacement) was desperately needed. This was in the middle of the crypto gpu boom, so a decent GPU alone would've wiped my budget. I settled for an xbox as it was cheaper than a ps5.

I've always seen myself as part of the pc master race, and thought consoles to be very limited. But man, it just worked, the games just worked, and gamepass made it all a total steal.

Even now, when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night, me and my wife's preferred entertainment is a session of bg3 over watching tv.

wileydragonfly• 4 months ago

Series X is a premium experience. Walmart delivered one for $350 at 4am with Diablo 4. Still feels like robbery a couple of years later.

ezst• 4 months ago

when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night

Seemed a credible comment till that point! (/s)

Congrats :-)

bakies• 4 months ago

gamepass made it all a total steal

Doing the math i can't find this to be true. As some one that has honed my taste in games, and have a large steam library, I don't spend as much money on games as game pass cost.

kleene_op• 4 months ago

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

Maybe that's what they're trying to achieve with Windows as well.

aizk• 4 months ago

Definitely there's some truth to it

HerbManic• 4 months ago

Pretty much, if you provide what people want elsewhere you will reduce the demand to crack the original system.

One of the reasons the Wii U was slow to be hacked was because Android TV boxes had come along plus things like Ouya/Nvidia shield, and it basically took away a lot of demand for a console turned into TV unit to use hacked software.

It still happened but not so quiclkly. Not like the original Wii which didnt really have much similar to it at the time.

Kiboneu• 4 months ago

No it doesn’t explain it. This is legitimately a difficult target. Did you watch the talk?

The people that MS hired to make and break this were top notch, and there is definitely incentive to maintain control over a content platform. This dude has been at this for /years/. I’ve been a fly on the wall on all sides to observe this.

There has been a lot of interest in underground / pirate communities to hack this, but that’s not the only reason why people hack things.

JoeAltmaier• 4 months ago

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?

jolan2• 4 months ago

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

lxgr• 4 months ago

Depends on the size of the system you need to secure.

If kilobytes of storage and very limited computing power works for your use case, you can get very secure (smartcards and secure elements remain essentially undefeated at the hardware level; all attacks I know happened via weak ciphers).

For an entire current-gen gaming console, you'll have a much harder time.

jvillegasd• 4 months ago

Don't ever call a thing "unhackable", because every single human creation is imperfect

Cthulhu_3• 4 months ago

Nobody was calling it that, which is why the title is in 'quotes'.

echelon_musk2• 4 months ago

He is one of us :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gaasedelen

everyone• 4 months ago

It had those e-fuses in it right? *Seriously* it should be illegal to sell anything with those.

megous• 4 months ago

E-fuses are just write once memory with limited reads ability 10e6-10e7 read cycles after which it becomes unreliable.

Secure boot that can't be controlled by the user should be illegal, though. You should get some secret code along with a device, that allows you as the buyer to tamper with it. So much hardware out there can just serve as something else, or can be supported by people on a voluntary basis, sans the completely arbitrary lockdown of ability to install your own code to the device.

Gigachad2• 4 months ago

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.

kasabali• 4 months ago

What a huge sin. God forbid I could install whatever the version I want on the device I paid for.

mike_hearn6• 4 months ago

Amazing talk. Here's a quick writeup if you don't want to watch the full hour or don't have enough hardware knowledge to follow what Markus is talking about, as he goes very fast, in some cases too fast to even let you read the text on his slides. It's mandatory to use the pause key to understand the full details even if you have a deep understanding of every relevant technology, of which he explains none.

The Xbox uses a very advanced variant of the same technologies that also exist on smartphones, tablets and Secure Boot enabled PCs. When fully operational the Xbox security system prevents any unsigned code from running, keeps all code encrypted, proves to remote servers (Xbox Live) that it's a genuine device running in a secure state, and on this base you can build strong anti-piracy checks and block cheating.

The Xbox has several processors and what follows applies to the Platform Security Processor. When a computer starts up (any computer), the CPU begins execution in a state in which basically nothing works, including external communication and even RAM. Executions starts at a 'reset vector' mapped to a boot ROM i.e. the bytes are hard-wired into the silicon itself and can't be changed. The boot ROM then executes instructions to progressively enable more and more hardware, including things like activating RAM. Until that point the whole CPU executes out of its cache lines and can't use more memory than exists on-die.

Getting to the state where the Xbox can achieve all its security goals thus requires it to boot through a series of chained steps which incrementally bring the hardware online, and each step must verify the integrity of the next. The boot ROM is only 19kb of code and a few more kb of data, and can't do much beyond just activating RAM, the memory mapping unit (called MPU on the Xbox), and reading some more code out of writeable flash RAM. The code it reads from flash RAM is the second stage bootloader where much more work gets done, but from this second stage on it can be patched remotely by Microsoft. So if bugs are found there or in any later stage, it hardly matters because MS can issue a software update and detect remotely on Xbox Live servers if that upgrade was applied, so kicking out cheaters and pirates. The second stage boot loader in turn loads more code from disk, signature checks and decrypts it, sets up lots of software security schemes like hypervisors and so on, all the way up to the OS and the games.

Therefore to break Xbox security permanently you have to attack the boot ROM, because that's the only part that can't be changed via a software update. It's the keys to the kingdom and this is what Markus attacked. Attacking the boot ROM is very, very hard. The Xbox team were highly competent:

• Normally the bringup code would be written by the CPU or BIOS vendors but MS wrote it all in house themselves from scratch.

• The code isn't public and has never leaked. To obtain it, someone had to decode it visually by looking at the chip under a scanning electron microscope and map the atomic pictures to bits and then to bytes.

• Having the code barely helps because there are no bugs in it whatsoever.

So, the only way to manipulate it is to actually screw with the internals of the CPU itself by "glitching", meaning tampering with the power supply to the chip at exactly the right moment to corrupt the state of the internal electronics. Glitching a processor has semi-random effects and you don't control what happens exactly, but sometimes you can get lucky and the CPU will skip instructions. By creating a device that reboots the machine over and over again, glitching each time, you can wait until one of those attempts gets lucky and makes a tiny mistake in the execution process.

Glitching attacks predate the Xbox and were mostly used on smartcards until the Xbox 360, which was successfully attacked this way. So Microsoft knew all about them and added many mitigations, beyond "just" writing bug free code:

1. The boot ROM is full of randomized loops that do nothing but which are designed to make it hard to know where in the program the CPU has got to. Glitching requires near perfect timing and this makes it harder.

2. They hardware-disabled the usual status readouts that can be used to know where the program got up to and debug the boot process.

3. They hash-chain execution to catch cases where steps were skipped, even though that's impossible according to program logic.

4. They effectively use a little 'kernel' and run parts of the boot sequence as 'user mode' programs, so that if sensitive parts of the code are glitched they are limited in how badly they can tamper with the boot process.

And apparently there are even more mitigations added post-2013. Markus managed to bypass these by chaining two glitch attacks together, one which skipped past the code that turned on the MMU, which made it possible to break out of one of the the usermode 'processes' (not really a process) and into the 'kernel', and one which then was able to corrupt the CPU state during a memcpy operation, allowing him to take control of the CPU as it was copying the next stage from flash RAM.

If you can take control of the boot ROM execution then you can proceed to decrypt the next stage, skip the signature checks and from there do whatever you want in ways that can't be detected remotely - however, the fact that you're using a 2013 Phat device still can be.

nerdsniper• 4 months ago

Thank you, sincerely. My main question now is, what degree of repeatability has Markus achieved so far?

mike_hearn6• 4 months ago

On Phat consoles? You could turn it into a modchip, if for some reason you wanted to. It'd be repeatable on every boot but might take a while.

The hard work comes after this though. There are lots of software level mitigations MS could use to keep the old devices usable with Xbox Live if they really wanted to. Just because you can boot anything you want doesn't mean you can't be detected remotely, it just makes it harder for MS to do so reliably. You'd be in a constant game of catch-up.

Retr0id6• 4 months ago

It's mandatory to use the pause key to understand the full details

I was going to say I disagreed but the rest of your comment reminded me that I've accumulated a lot of domain-specific knowledge.

mike_hearn6• 4 months ago

What I meant is that at points he skips past slides so quick even very fast readers can't absorb every bullet point. I read at ~2-3x the average speed, have lots of domain knowledge and couldn't read fast enough to get every word on every slide. So the pause key is very useful for that even if you know what's coming.

mysteria2• 4 months ago

Thanks for this writeup as I haven't had time to review the video yet :)

Considering that the PSP is a small ARM processor that presumably takes up little die space, would it make sense for it to them employ TMR with three units in lockstep to detect these glitches? I really doubt that power supply tampering would cause the exact same effect in all three processors (especially if there are differences in their power circuitry to make this harder) and any disrepancies would be caught by the system.

Retr0id6• 4 months ago

The Nintendo switch 2 uses DCLS (Dual-core lockstep) in the BPMP and PSC (PSC is PSP-like but RISC-V). So yes, it helps - I'm unsure if/where msft uses it on their products.

gautamcgoel• 4 months ago

Just wanted to say this is an amazing technical writeup, thanks for sharing.

aservus• 4 months ago

xbox is always trying to limit the users, when a person buys something, he clearly gets the ownership of the thing yet companies nowadays are trying really hard to sell some subscription while giving the illusion that the owner of the product is in control all the while keeping him in control. is there anyone else who feels the same way?

gradientsrneat• 4 months ago

Could this technique be used to reverse-engineer end-of-life Nvidia GPUs to improve Noveau on them?

saagarjha4• 4 months ago

Surely it would be easier to do research on a normal Nvidia GPU in your computer?

natas• 4 months ago

I wonder... if microsoft can't secure a gaming console which they have full control on, from top to bottom, how do they secure "Azure Government"?

physicles• 4 months ago

When your hardware is in the physical custody of the attacker, the threat model changes significantly. Designing a console that takes years for attackers to crack is an impressive feat of engineering.

Lammy• 4 months ago

The point of the gaming console is to get hacked, because that's how they develop the security techniques that metastasize over to strangle general-purpose computing, which is the real goal. Device attestation is a perfect example of this.

int0x29• 4 months ago

That game console isn't in a data center with CCTV coverage, mandatory access control, guards, and employees with background checks. If somone is soldering wires to your server and doing fault injection something has gone very wrong. Azure Government customers also don't have to worry about the NSA demanding access.

Cthulhu_3• 4 months ago

I don't believe servers actually have this level of hardware protection to be honest. Physical protection, as someone else pointed out, on the other hand.

If hacking the xbox goes wrong, the hacker will short out the console. If hacking Azure goes wrong, the hacker will get shot.

Peanuts99• 4 months ago

Azures physical servers actually use a similar technology apparently. They both have some kind of proprietary HSM module that stores keys on the device and is resistant to tampering. I've read that Azure servers actually break this protection when removed from the rack so the server is made entirely useless if it's removed.

missing_cipher• 4 months ago

Good think MS had a fallback to the RSA encryption if that ever failed, lol

MichelleM2030• 4 months ago

This is great news. I’ve actually been spending my weekends learning how to modify my old 360 and play great games to relive some of those younger days, while my Series X gathers dust.

deepriverfish• 4 months ago

has there ever been a modern game console post 90s, that's really unhackable?

Retr0id6• 4 months ago

There's no such thing as unhackable, only "not yet hacked".

selectively4• 4 months ago

Where are the slides at?

coretx• 4 months ago

Can someone answer yes/no to the question ; is this the cheap steam box now ?

saagarjha4• 4 months ago

No.

michaelbrave• 4 months ago

I would like to try running linux on an xbox series-x (but thought it wasn't in the cards), it might make for a decent openclaw setup.

client4• 4 months ago

The RE//verse conference has very high signal to nosie for reverse engineering content and attendees. I'd highly recommend it if it's an area you're interested in.

bsjshshsb• 4 months ago

Not calling something un(bad thing)able is a lesson we learned back from the Titanic

hulitu• 4 months ago

Microsoft's 'unhackable'

Who believes that ?

umeridrisi• 4 months ago

So, they are spending like billions and they are the top tech company in the world, still not able to make a thing unhackable?

danwills• 4 months ago

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!

JustSkyfall• 4 months ago

I mean, considering that it's been 13 years since the release, I think they did pretty well!

Areena_28• 4 months ago

The "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.

AnssiH• 4 months ago

I don't think the vendor ever said "unhackable" in this case, though. At least not publicly.

oldestofsports• 4 months ago

Why do you put 'unhackable' within quotes, like it would be a direct quote from Microsoft? I can't find any record of them using that word.

cylemons• 4 months ago

I interpreted it as scare quotes in general. Like "previously thought unhackable Xbox One has been hacked"

Paulo75• 4 months ago

Voltage glitching attacks are pretty brutal to defend against because you're essentially fighting physics, not software. You can write perfect code and still get bypassed by someone manipulating the electrical signals at the right microsecond..

bparsons• 4 months ago

I really wish I could root my series x -- especially in this age of RAM and GPU scarcity.

rbanffy2• 4 months ago

I would imagine jail breaking modern PlayStations and Xboxes would not be as interesting as the PS3 or Xbox 360. The modern generations are too close to PCs. I miss the time when console makers were also making interesting CPUs and, sometimes, GPUs.

BTW, what would be the specs for a Xbox 360? I remember the PS3 was a rather limited Linux workstation because it lacked RAM (and tge hypervisor limited access to the GPU - a limitation gone when jailbroken), but I haven’t read much about the 360 and its own weird PowerPC.

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

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