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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

What's it with Nintendo and fucking up basic use cases anyway? Seriously, are they expecting USB-based jailbreaks or why not even include something a lot of players have been shouting on the web for years now?!

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Yes. It's defense in depth; the 3DS was hacked dozens of ways over its lifetime. Via specially crafted saved games in some cases. There were a few media-based buffer overflow hacks too, iirc. The DS before that could get hacked by certain sounds via Bangai-O Spirits level transfer.

>USB-based jailbreaks

What kind of new-fangled hack is that? Here in Switch-land we just use a bit of tinfoil for our piracy needs.

I thought that vulnerability was gone since at least September 2019 with the 2nd revision?

It is, but the core vulnerability of the chipset (Tegra X1) still exists AFAIK. Granted, you need to hardmod to jailbreak a Mariko model (launch models can be softmodded), but that's basically the same thing that happened with the 3DS.

It's a different exploit. The original exploit is an issue with the Tegra's recovery mode (RCM), requiring a USB payload to be sent to the Switch at boot every time.

I believe the hardmod is a voltage glitching exploit, as described for the Vita here: https://yifan.lu/images/2019/01/Injecting_Software_Vulnerabi... . It is able to inject code through the onboard memory then load a payload from a memory card rather than USB.

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