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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft really seemed to be ahead of the curve with console security. They really thought this through back in 2005 or so, to the point where clearly, they knew people would hack the drives to rewrite the serial number. It's probably for the best that they never actually did anything about the knowledge that gave them, but they clearly stayed a step ahead of the game. As much as I hate it, their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them. Compared to the Nintendo Wii, which had a decent security model that was ultimately ill-fated due to several fatal flaws in both hardware and firmware, and the PlayStation, where Sony seems to have a continual problem developing security measures that hackers and modders can just completely ignore, Microsoft really pulled it off. I still wish game consoles would allow you to just run your own code. Xbox has dev mode, which I haven't ever used since I generally do not buy game consoles, but it does seem like the absolute best option that's been available to consumers lately. Before then, it was OtherOS (ill-fated,) PS2 Linux (cool but kinda limited,) and Net Yaroze? Which seemed awesome to me, but unfortunately was a relatively uncommon good. Beyond that, official escapes from the walled garden are truly scarce. A sad reality that will get worse when measures like remote attestation finally make their way to general purpose computers. Remember: you can never have nice things. Ever.

Thanks for FATXplorer BTW, it is very useful.

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Every time I hear about the XBox's platform security, I think back to this talk [1] about how Microsoft protected the XBox One. A lot of it boils down to clear requirements and good engineering, and many of these technologies are now showing up via Project Pluton.

[1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

and many of these technologies are now showing up via Project Pluton.

More awareness needs to be made of how this will have a devestating impact on end-user freedom. They're attacking the PC, one of the last holdouts of general-purpose computing freedom. Remote attestation will make it so you "can" technically run your own hardware and software (and that's what the FUD-spreaders will always say), but you'll be denied access to lots of, increasingly online, services.

Edit: nice, downvotes. Hello corpo-authoritarians, we know what's up :-)

Apple (and to a lesser extent Android) have already gone this route, and Windows 11 originally wanted to push _hard_ on enforcing the presence of more platform security. DRM schemes already perform remote attestation before you can stream 4K Netflix.

Linux and Open Source may be one of the last remaining barriers to this becoming widespread. It's one of the main reasons I whole-heartedly support Valve and their Steam Deck ambitions, and encourage everyone to do the same. Money trumps everything else, so as long as the money to be made from supporting SteamOS > money thought to be saved from piracy, I believe we can still thwart this.

> DRM schemes already perform remote attestation before you can stream 4K Netflix.

On Intel clients, this is done via the Management Engine, bypassing both the CPU and operating system, as the ME can control display output.

Is there any mechanism for it to validate that the thing connected to the display output is an unmodified monitor which also implements DRM? Otherwise it would be almost trivial to have a device with HDMI-in that gets a pixel perfect feed of the protected stream.

Yes, that's called HDCP. The master key was cracked long ago for older versions.

For new versions, you can get a converter; hdcp 2.2 -> hdcp 1.4 and then use whatevee breakage on 1.4. So it's only effective if you don't search.

You can’t produce good quality rips like this, if that was the best solution the DRM people would have won.

You can produce pixel perfect rips. But since the resulting video file is so large you will "need" to compress it, and then you get compression on compression artefacts.

It would be really interesting to make a video compressor that specializes in "recompressing" previously compressed data. A simple version could be special handling of common compression artifacts and trying to detect various transforms and trying to take advantage of the detail already removed instead of removing additional detail.

If you knew the codec used originally you could even try to (near) perfectly reconstruct the original bitstream. Especially if you know various codec parameters and some side-channel data (such as which video data is contained in which encrypted blocks) it may be possible to relatively efficiently search for the bitstream that decompresses to the data that you are seeing.

Yes, indeed. Pixel perfect rips of already compressed streams, immensely blowing up the size and requiring another round of lossy compression to actually be useful.

And the result after recompression is impeccable so it is not a big deal. It is just a bit cumbersome.

The result after recompression is far from impeccable.

On high bitrate content you wouldn't notice.

Sure, but you get to push your encoder settings far less than you otherwise could. You always end up with either significantly bigger files or significantly lower quality.

It's significant closer to 5 percent or 50 percent?

doubt it, should be on OS level, gpu control for all possible vendors and output formats is impossible without gpu driver support.

It's specific to the Intel GPU. Intel PAVP (Protected Audio-Video Path). See page 192 of Intel's "Platform Embedded Security Technology Revealed" (2014), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6572-6

> Remote attestation will make it so you "can" technically run your own hardware and software (and that's what the FUD-spreaders will always say), but you'll be denied access to lots of, increasingly online, services.

It's good to raise awareness of the centralization risks of remote attestation. One pro-security, pro-freedom alternative is local attestation, e.g. to a USB security key running OSS firmware under user control. Widespread use of user-controlled attestations would make it harder for cloud services to impose unilateral requirements, requiring negotiation among competing objectives.

One remote attestation scenario could be disaggregation of critical apps into dedicated on-device VMs which look like cloud lambdas/functions/unikernels. Remote attestation could be done for a special-purpose VM (e.g. banking), leaving other general purpose OS VMs unrestricted. This is possible today with Windows Hyper-V on secured-core x86/Arm hardware, Android 13 with the pKVM hypervisor on Pixel 6/7 hardware, and the HP/Bromium AX hypervisor.

MS/Pluton thread, https://twitter.com/dwizzzlemsft/status/1511440279462563842

> what are they going to say when it's supported in Linux and we open source it ... the Pluton team also uses Linux daily, builds TWO Microsoft Linux distros, and upstreams Linux kernel features.

On servers, a forward-looking approach is being taken with OCP Caliptra, an open root of trust that will precede booting of the main SoC (including Pluton) and mandates open firmware that must be dual-signed by both the OEM and the datacenter owner. It is an early attempt to forestall ME/PSP/BMC Groundhog Day. If it succeeds on OCP servers (where datacenter owners have power to negotiate with OEM/ODMs), perhaps more transparency and owner control/veto can be brought to client devices, https://twitter.com/platformsec/status/1533398356088737793.

One pro-security, pro-freedom alternative is local attestation

What's the point? That's about as useful as running your own CA. The fact is, those pushing remote attestation want remote centralised control and they're going to care that you have your own attestation infrastructure as much as they'll care that you have your own CA, i.e. they're not going to be satisfied because they're trusting their own, and not yours.

the Pluton team also uses Linux daily, builds TWO Microsoft Linux distros, and upstreams Linux kernel features.

That's even scarier. If the only form of "supported" Linux becomes Microsoft Linux (with its own unique brand of spyware and other crap forced on you due to RA), don't say we never saw it coming: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... or perhaps that last E should now be Enslave.

If it succeeds on OCP servers (where datacenter owners have power to negotiate with OEM/ODMs), perhaps more transparency and owner control/veto can be brought to client devices,

We already had "owner control" until they started trying to take that away from us. We don't need nor want attestation at all. No means NO!

> they're not going to be satisfied because they're trusting their own, and not yours.

This cuts in both directions. Unlike signing certificates, attestation is not a zero-sum fight over a single monolithic measurement attribute that can only be A or B, it can support a goal of having A and B, e.g. as disaggregated VMs. If a cloud wants subset B, then the user/owner/enterprise local attestation can insist that the client must also have subset A, otherwise it can reject subset-B-without-A. Also applies to multiple clouds with conflicting requirements.

Enterprise clients connected to centralized clouds are not the same as consumption-oriented DRM, where the decision is grant/deny. Enterprise client devices generate business data that is sent to the cloud, and they consume data/compute/apps from the cloud. If businesses stop sending data to the cloud, the hybrid workflow breaks down. It's not as one-sided as Netflix DRM.

> We already had "owner control" until they started trying to take that away from us.

With the exception of IBM POWER / Talos servers that have open firmware including the BMC, most servers depend on many blobs, so there has been little transparency for owners, never mind control. One has to start somewhere, and Caliptra starts at the beginning, with an open silicon+firmware RoT that can potentially evaluate some of the myriad blobs and processors and devices needed to bring a server online.

E.g. DMTF SPDM can be used for local PCI (or virtualized I/O like NVMe-over-TCP) device attestation of firmware integrity to the server, before the device is authorized for use in the server, https://www.dmtf.org/standards/SPDM & https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/plank

> What's the point? That's about as useful as running your own CA.

Running your own CA IS useful.

> More awareness needs to be made of how this will have a devestating impact on end-user freedom. They're attacking the PC, one of the last holdouts of general-purpose computing freedom.

This situation reminds me of the fuss around Palladium, a solution which seemed to be abandoned by Microsoft on its merits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...

> Edit: nice, downvotes. Hello corpo-authoritarians, we know what's up :-)

This also reminds me of the fuss around Palladium:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m

The PC will eventually lock up more. Free general-purpose computing will remain on things like Raspberry Pi (and many other variants). There will be Windows computers, like we now have Macs, and Windows-incapable computers to run Linux (or whatever else open OS).

RPi boot path includes the GPU/VPU, which runs a binary blob based on an older version of ThreadX RTOS, whose upstream is now called Azure RTOS ThreadX. Work on an open-source replacement has been slowly inching forward for a few years.

Arm, including the quirky RPi, is not comparable in openness to x86 general purpose desktops, which were a happy confluence of accidents, determined individuals and scrappy businesses. That is still worth defending, if only to slow the slide backwards.

M1 Macs have a unique take on hardware security that can co-exist with general-purpose computing for open-source Linux, and Apple's vertical integration. https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/speaker/xeno_kovah/. Hopefully Asahi Linux will succeed in creating a relatively maintainable port for multiple generations of Apple Silicon.

The open replacement for the RPi boot blob:

https://github.com/librerpi/

Free general-purpose computing will remain on things like Raspberry Pi

Leaving aside the debatable nature of how open and free a RPi is, what's the point of "general-purpose computing" when it can't actually be used? When/if you need a locked-down machine controlled by some central authority to do what you can still do today with a free and open one, i.e. create and consume media, interact with services, communicate with others, etc., how much value does a truly libre computer have? It's almost like the "just build your own platform" argument when it comes to censorship.

Not to mention that no design is absolutely safe, and if security enclaves like Pluton get exploited to run backdoor, it'll be a lot harder for end user to detect.

It's worth looking at the multi-year CHERI research project on capabilities, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007474, which has influenced Arm security features and roadmaps. Pluton could be viewed as a stepping stone to CHERI. From a recent blog post by MS Research, https://saaramar.github.io/memory_safety_blogpost_2022/

> these tiny parts usually run with high privileges and dramatically impact the overall system. In such cases, MTE/CHERI play pretty nicely - they help ensure that whatever bugs we have in these areas are killed at their root cause (probabilistically/deterministically). This is exactly why MSR, MSRC and Azure Silicon pushed for this AMAZING project of CheriIoT ... scaling CHERI down to RISC-V32E, the smallest core RISC-V specification. I’m very excited about this project, and I hope once we will open-source the ISA and the prototype, more folks across the industry could join.

That is a direction that would benefit everyone: open silicon and open firmware for the most security sensitive components. It is technically possible and at least some humans in big companies understand the importance to future would-be-digital civilizations.

See also: Intel Management Engine exploits.

https://kakaroto.ca/2019/11/exploiting-intels-management-eng...

You say this on a forum where the majority probably has an iphone or macbook, of course people are going to be tone-deaf to it.

Not even the HN-audience cares enough to turn down something shiny.

This is what I found on "Project Pluton" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2020/11/17/mee...

There was a PSEC 2019 talk on Azure Sphere (IoT), with some details on Pluton security features and the Microsoft Linux hardened kernel based on OpenEmbedded/Yocto. Briefly mentioned is Microsoft's QEMU emulation of Pluton for CI/CD and their segmented architecture for delivery of 10 years of Linux security updates to the device, even if the IoT vendor goes out of business leaving the application firmware unmaintained.

https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/seay/ (click Hardware tag to seek video to the Pluton section)

IEEE paper (2021, paywall) on Pluton, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9512305

I love the newest entrant to the console wars, who decided to just run their game store on a Linux computer, optimize the UX a bit and make it all work great with its chosen hardware. Currently maybe a bit underpowered, but shows great promise and I believe the Steam Deck has a bright future in front of it.

The Steam Deck has sold fewer than 1% the number of Switches sold, which tells me there is far more to selling a console than the technology. Well, that’s an obvious statement, but I think many of us tech people commonly under-appreciate all the “non-engineering” components to making a product successful.

I think “optimize the UX a bit” is what they did, and it falls very woefully short of what they need. Especially when it arguably has a far bigger and better library of titles.

I hope Valve doesn’t throw in the towel after the first round. The Steam Deck idea can be a killer one. It just needs a lot more UX polish and marketing.

Huh? I don't even think there Are official Steam Deck sales numbers. The best I can find was that they shipped over 1 million last October, not sold. But that was actually not long after they BEGAN shipping units. Not only that, but we're comparing it to the Switch, which is one of THE best selling game consoles ever. However, in its first year, IIRC, it actually "only" sold around 10 million units. That suggests that in its first year, the Steam Deck sold at least around 10% of what the Switch sold (although the deck was a lot more supply constrained, so it may have been higher if not for that.)

Since Valve doesn't share actual numbers, or at least has not done so yet, it's really hard to judge, but I think you're painting a picture that is at least a bit too pessimistic. I don't know if Valve actually expected to outsell stalwart console vendors, but I would actually guess they DID outsell the PS Vita's first year. That's really not too bad for a foray into a saturated market with a somewhat niche and admittedly even somewhat immature product.

Steam Deck probably has a bright future, but I'm most interested to hear if they had any success breaking into the market in Asia, as it seemed like that was a big push for them and probably generally one of the hardest markets for Valve/Steam, for a variety of different reasons. I have to guess the sales numbers in North America are pretty good based on how quickly we went through the preorders.

The PS Vita is an apt point of comparison - a beautiful piece of hardware that performed fantastically (and in my opinion much more impressive for its time than the steam deck) - that is considered to have been a complete failure.

Steam Deck really is an interesting comparison. It must be frustrating that Valve releases Steam Deck to fanatical reception if you feel like PS Vita was a better product for it's time. Even though PS Vita may have been a great product, it's possibly one that simply was not at the right place or time. I really think that Sony needed to win, not just sell modestly.

A big and weird part of this is simply because Valve is different. Still a corporation, still flawed, but certainly, if nothing else, definitely different. They have an appeal almost reminiscent of how people once regarded Google a long time ago. They've gotten a solid reputation for playing the long game with respect to building their ecosystem, and in that regard, Deck feels like a product many years in the making: the Steam client and games library, Proton and DXVK, the overlay and other middleware libraries, the multiple iterations of SteamOS, and many more endeavors all came into the product that the Deck is today.

Meanwhile, PS Vita did not have the luxury of the depth of consumer goodwill that Valve has, even if Sony has many times the breadth of consumer goodwill; worse, it needed to bootstrap it's ecosystem, whereas Valve has committed to bringing it's entire existing ecosystem to Deck instead. Valve also had the luxury of not being a traditional video game console vendor, and thus I don't think it elicited as strong of a reaction in the "console wars" either: I do not think that people view it the same. And hell, I don't think Valve does either. It has an aggressive starting price, and thus definitely can compete, but it seems probably still profitable. At the higher end, it's priced more like a gaming laptop, and thus the enthusiast gear that you would expect. I think they landed themselves a nearly unloseable situation with Deck. Because it's basically just an extension of their existing Steam ecosystem, it's essentially a value-add at worst. I would bet it acts more complimentary to other consoles, and there are probably few Deck owners without at least one other game console.

As a competitor to Nintendo's gaming handhelds and as a successor to the PSP, it seems like consumers largely rejected the PS Vita. Maybe in an alternate universe where Sony took an entirely different approach to the ecosystem and marketing of the PS Vita, things could've gone very differently.

For what it's worth, I've never owned a console of any kind in my life, but I would really like to own a Steam Deck.

Though I could buy the Steam Deck now, I am eagerly waiting for Steam Deck 2 just to see if there are lessons-learned-improvements from the first iteration.

I smhave one and say its perfectly useable already - and would recommend getting one, even just to vote with your wallet for something nice.

> Though I could buy the Steam Deck now, I am eagerly waiting for Steam Deck 2 just to see if there are lessons-learned-improvements from the first iteration.

Just wait for the Steam Deck 3, where they'll solve all the problems that don't even exist yet on the Steam Deck 2. Or better yet, might just wait for the Steam Deck 5 just to make sure they've finally ironed out all the kinks.

It's Valve; you know there will never be a third iteration.

Not sure why you're so antagonistic. I don't know you or how you live your life, but as an unsolicited advice, perhaps you could have a moment of introspection. Cheers!

I will acknowledge my precious comment was a tad antagonistic, sorry.

I'm just saying, if it's something you want, it fits your needs today, and you've got the budget for it, just buy it. Don't wait for the "what if the next generation is better?", Because of course the next generation will probably be better, if it comes out. But this fits your needs well enough today, and it's something you want, and there will always be something newer supplanting whatever you buy in the future as well.

So if you're thinking you'll wait for the 2 because it'll be better than the original, why get the 2? Won't the 3 be better? And of course, the 4 will be better than the 3, so maybe you shouldn't buy the 3 but instead wait for the 4. But what if there's a 5th generation...

Why would I buy the iPhone of today, won't the one next year be faster? And the one the year after that be faster than next year? Why would I buy the one this year when there will probably be a better one available eventually?

I just never got this line of reasoning. Could you share why you'd wait for the 2, but not the 3?

Cheers!

It's a very strong pattern that the gap between version one and version two is much bigger than anywhere else, with much bigger flaws existing and being fixed.

I'm very surprised that you don't seem to be aware of this, and treat it purely as n versus n+1.

It just recently became available to purchase without a waitlist, they are still learning about hardware production, supply chains and other things they haven't done at the same scale before. Give it some time, especially when comparing to Nintendo who've been doing it for decades.

The Switch is the fifth best selling console of all time. That's not at all a fair comparison, especially given the difference in price point and how long the Switch has been on the market.

On the other hand, it's plausible that the Steam Deck could hit within 50% of Vita, the Wii U or Gamecube, which is amazing for Valve's second push into the console market, and immensely profitable, given Valve owns pretty much the only avenue with which people will be buying games for it and gets a 30% cut, on top of the Deck being significantly more expensive than any comparable console, now or historically.

I think it’s also not fair to compare it to commercially failed consoles like the Wii U or Game Cube.

I just picked the closest analog: a modern handheld that can be plugged into a TV.

Steam Deck is also very much not like those consoles.

When the Game Cube "fails" as a product, all the worlds Game Cubes become just cubes that you can't do anything interesting with.

If Steam Deck "fails", it becomes merely a funky form factor PC. Plug it into a monitor via USB-C and it's a full desktop computer. With a surprisingly okay price for that, too!

In what universe can Wii U or Game Cube be considered "failed"? They were hugely successful. You need a much better definition of failure than "not number one".

I don't think comparing new entry to the market with the OG pioneer is fair in any way, shape or form. Nintendo did get a 33 year head start.

I think they sold enough to justify its existence, even if it's not much comparing to console manufacturers

I don't get this. Hacking was huge on the 360, as was piracy that JTAG thing using the cooler runner and browning out the processor after slowing it, there were multiple mod chips and finally the ODEs coming out the wazhoo.

The funny thing about security is it's about the weakest links they find.

So you can harden link A as much as you want if link B is a dud all the extra work on A was wasted energy.

What's most impressive is Xbox realised this and added in Dev mode.

What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up!

I had an xecuter mod on the first Xbox and a 2TB hard drive, you could do so many many things with Xbox Media Center on the very first Xbox - FTP your games over.

TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. One of the greatest things about the 360 out of the box was it played popular video codecs directly from USB storage - unmodded!

Unheard of at the time.

I had an early model PSX console in high school and bought the plug and play mod chip online in 2000 or so. Rented a lot of games and bought a lot of verbatim blue bottoms

Later a USB plus 1 wire mod chip for the PS2 that let me play backups and homebrew

>TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC.

According to sources, a modified original Xbox running the latest XBMC was put on the center podium, was shown off, and the executives had ordered the engineers to "make the new xbox do this"...and it was.

The 360's early media capabilities were absolutely unheard of for the time

I was blown away when half way through the setup of my 360 my desktop running Vista helpfully chimed in saying it found the 360 and offered to let me stream all my MP3's right to it while playing games

Apple and Amazon are only now adding the group watch functionality that Netflix had on the 360. I really don’t know why this fell off because it was really popular within my friend group and we’d watch a movie together a couple times a month.

I have an Xbox 360 that has never played a game in its life, but served many years as a media center extender. Microsoft really did get that thing right.

> What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up! This applies to the whole early XBox story. Microsoft learns the right lessons... Sony learns the wrong ones.

XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation.

XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by getting more games and really doubling down on Halo (the biggest draw to XBox back then). XBox wins the generation.

Note: this is from memory, didn't check sources!

FWIW the "PS3 is faster" is still debated to this day, mainly due to the Cell's "weird" architecture

If you remove the SPE's from the equation (which many developers did) the PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU, while the Xbox has a 3.2Ghz Triple Core (6 thread) PPC64

The extra threads aren't directly as useful as games back then were almost entirely single-threaded, a trend that has only begun to really change course in the last decade or so (partially due to the Xbone and PS4 having anemic Bulldozer derived CPU's that had weak single-thread performance)

>PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU

IIRC it's not even a dual core but a single core with two threads.

Sony really dropped the ball with the PS3 chip.

It's a shame they invested hundreds of millions or even billions in this new, hot, complicated to use chip, only for it to be completely surpassed by off the shelf x86 parts.

Sony though the chip would be so good they could sell it to be used in super computers for years to come, but by the time it was out, x86 had basically caught up and no customers cared about buying their cell processor.

>XBox wins the generation.

The winner of 7th generation was clearly Nintendo with their Wii: over 100 million units.

And the funny thing is 2nd place: PS3! Just at the end of the generation it managed to outnumber X360.

Yup, MS really threw it all away with their Kinect play.

And then they took this strategy into the XBox One generation: everyone gets a Kinect! For $100 more than the competition! And it's always listening, and you have to have it connected for the system to boot!

Piling onto that with "we're getting rid of game sharing or the resell market" and "our new console is going to be your entertainment hub, i.e. it's going to be jammed full of shit most gamers don't want!" and the launch was just... ugh.

Xbox One premiere was a disaster since the design reveal. I saw it and was like "you must be kidding". Original X1 doesn't look like magnetowid - my magnetowid looks way better! Xbox One S is what X1 should have been since the very beginning.

Hell, they knew it from the PS1 era: Net Yaroze may not have stopped people from trying to hack their PlayStation 1, but it definitely appealed to a part of the crowd that would be most interested in that sort of thing. (And they even included a toolchain! Truly must've been special to be a part of that.)

I think the trouble is that people kept finding ways back from arbitrary code execution in a limited environment to running pirated games and cheating in online games, and Sony continually failed to actually manage that.

All or nothing thinking about security misses the point entirely.

Security is about reducing the frequency of events, and the impact of those events- Not making things philosophically impossible.

> Hacking was huge on the 360

It was! I was a pre-teen then but I remember modded controllers and getting into modded lobbies. The only modding I did was USB modding my avatar and gamerscore, only to login a month or so later to the prompt that my account was banned forever.

PS3 had Linux, until Sony pushed an update which killed it off. It was also trivial to upgrade the hard drive.

>their actions show a great deal of respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers, because if they didn't, they would've never bothered to do such an effort thwarting them.

dude. The irony. They bricked our machines and joked about it. They had a fellowship with the FBI.

They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail.

Their own Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement page still brags about "pwning the pwnrs" - to this day.

Make no mistake, MS and Xbox still hate us. It's just from a capitalist perspective, its hard to compete with losing PC audience.

Their only selling point is itself, an unhackable console.

They did have restraint. There is a list of console ID's hardcoded in every NAND because originally a few souls had reversed the NAND enough to RSA-sign CON files - they were just gonna ban everyone who had made modified content, but didnt... because of Halo3's File Share incidentally preserving personal RSA keys, making it difficult to reconcile modified content, once spread.

Regarding hacked DVD drives....they did the math and banned millions when it was profitable, ironically.

Yes. I agree.

> Make no mistake, MS and Xbox still hate us.

I should point out that I was not suggesting there was a good relationship between console hackers and Microsoft. Quote from me again:

> respect towards the ingenuity of console hackers

I did not say they had respect for the people, or that what they were doing was good, or anything like that. I'm claiming that from a security standpoint, they took the threat very seriously.

Microsoft legally bullying people is bad, but it's nothing new from Microsoft. Hell, it's nothing new from the console industry either. I actually was not aware of Microsoft putting anyone in jail over the Xbox homebrew/modding scene, but it does not surprise me. I remember what happened with Sony and Geohotz.

Still, from a sterile, technical point of view, I do think that in 2005 they were way, way ahead of keeping their console "secure" according to their threat model. I am never going to be particularly fond of a threat model where the adversary is the customer, but that's not really the point.

> I do think that in 2005 they were way, way ahead of keeping their console "secure" according to their threat model.

I agree, see my other comment re: KV.bin

They built the x360 with layers, upon layers, like an onion.

Two exploits (JTAG and RGH), and a few forever-unspeakable social engineering incidents aside, they did great work.

Until Mw2 came out in 2011.

Some Xbox hackers were arrested but it's fair. Some people stole hardware. This is interesting read. https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/45/

An hour later, wow. That podcast is mesmerising. That’s absolutely incredible what they were up to. Thanks for the share, on to part two now.

It's 95% accurate. The remaining 5% is to hide the identity of Person A.

I would consider contributing to a third episode with a new generation of stories/correbance/trivia, but with the amount of contribution from the feds to correct the record, I feel it would be unwise.

You have any more info on who this person is and what they were convicted of?

Probably the OP post is written by Eaton Zveare.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/09/could-you-end-up-in...

>They (MS and EA) threw OP, the author of this fkn submission, in jail.

It's not like they got jailed because of MS's sheer spite to hackers - no, they made good money hacking MS consoles. Essentially, it's one capitalist against the other, and they had to be aware of the rules of the game.

This was not a security feature at all, it wasn't securing anything? This is purely a feature to allow Microsoft to resell hard drives at 3x the price.

Sounds like semantics to me.

I think you will agree that security in computing is not just "prevent people from getting hacked" or some static goal like that, but rather security is the management of "threats" under a given "threat model".

DRM, for example, is DEFINITELY a form of security software. DRM is an attempt to uphold policies around the access and/or copying of digital data such that access, distribution, etc. is controlled by said policy. Like any security software, it is meaningless if it's trivial to bypass, so it employs techniques to prevent users from modifying it, inspecting it, and otherwise bypassing its security measures.

Similarly, technology that is meant to only allow licensed hardware is largely the same idea. Like SEGA's Trade Mark Security System, although instead of cryptographic signatures, they instead hinged on the threat of a lawsuit. This is still a form of security system, just with a very different model of the threat.

What I am not saying is that these security measures are any good for the consumer. Obviously, these measures are very largely anti-consumer. Arguably there are some potential consumer benefits in limited cases (the most honest answer is probably anti-cheat, because most online games are frustratingly unplayable without some strong approach to dissuade cheating) but that is still not really my point. How is this security? It's simple. It's security against the threat of the end user. It upholds policies that the device vendor would like to impose on the consumer.

A lock is still a security device even if you abuse it to lock somebody in a room against their will.

It secured a fat profit.

Nintendo is not far behind Sony in the (in)security department. The 3DS was hacked in several ways including an browser exploit that worked on recent firmware. The 3DS eShop was serving games via CDN with no authentication. And the first edition Switch has a hardware-based exploit that is unpatchable!

We really ought to thank Nvidia for that last one.

To this day, there is significantly better security in your XBox account to protect your in-game collectables than can be achieved by huge enterprises trying to protect their corporate secrets on Microsoft 365.

E.g.: the corporate default settings for MFA show zero additional information. Literally just an “accept” button. The XBox equivalent shows location, etc…

All of that is available in M365 though, it’s just off because many large IT departments optimize for ticket volume as opposed to quality or security.

I don’t think Xbox Dev Mode is really worth a damn. You can sideload apps but it’s not a vector for piracy or running Windows or Linux.

PS3 Linux was about as useless as PS2 Linux, because the PS3 had only 256MB of RAM. I put Ubuntu Server on one and used it as a Squid proxy server to route P2P traffic through to the university’s college of computing since P2P was blocked in the dorms. For some stupid reason I totally got away with it. PS3 running in one of the research labs 24/7 routing traffic all day.

> You can sideload apps but it’s not a vector for piracy or running Windows or Linux.

Rephrasing:

> You can sideload apps so it's not a vector for piracy

Most of the piracy scene depends on hackers figuring out how to break security so that they can run [SWEET DEMOS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8JaG6hQVbA) and homebrew apps on it. By saying "yeah mate here, toggle some settings, pay $90, and we'll even help you break the seal" it completely eliminates the drive that most experienced attackers have to actually attack it.

From what I understand there's an informal bounty among the Xbox and Hyper-V teams that increases on a regular basis for unsigned executables on the Xbox One platform.

I don't think ps2 and ps3 linux were intended to be used, ever. From what i can tell the only reason it existed at all was to allow sony to import it as a computer rather than a game console, which has higher tariffs imposed.

>I don’t think Xbox Dev Mode is really worth a damn. You can sideload apps but it’s not a vector for piracy

That's the point

The person I’m replying to make it sound like Xbox Dev Mode came about because Microsoft was tired of trying to keep hackers out, but the reality is Microsoft has kept hackers out. You can’t jailbreak an Xbox One.

If I recall correctly, Microsoft was about to cripple down the Dev Mode, what caused in the community, what led to increased interest in hacking X1, what made MS back off on their decision, after what the discussions quieten down.

I won't claim Dev Mode is their solution to hacker, but there seems to be some correlation.

I’m not sure why crippling a niche feature would drive people to try to jailbreak the Xbox One. It really is a useless feature unless you are developing an app/game for the Xbox One- then you won’t have to spend however much on a dev kit.

I believe indora has already said why under your initial comment:

>Most of the piracy scene depends on hackers figuring out how to break security so that they can run [SWEET DEMOS](...) and homebrew apps on it

That's definitely the experience I have with modding scene; piracy is rarely the primary goal. Yes, Dev Mode is a niche feature, but it's a feature appealing to the hacker's niche.

Yeah the only issue is that dev mode doesn’t enable would-be hackers to do any of that stuff.

It's literally what it's for though?

And from what I see, stuff like RetroArch can be run on normal console even without Dev Mode nowadays. Heck, you can play NES games directly in Edge browser without any shenanigans.

Things you could do on a jailbroken PS3 or JTAG'd Xbox 360 (besides playing pirated games) != things you can do on an Xbox One with dev mode enabled, including but not limited to: running Linux; viewing and controlling thermal performance of the console; modding games/enabling cheats; theming the UI; playing game discs made for a different region (e.g. PAL); backup game save files (I think this is a given on today's consoles but it was more restrictive back in the day).

Of course it doesn't give you as much power as a jailbreak would, but it gives just enough power to make putting the effort into hacking the console not worth it.

I just don't think there was really anyone who was putting effort into hacking the Xbox One just because they wanted the feature that they now get out of the box- sideloading/running unsigned code in a VERY sandboxed environment that can't run retail versions of games.

yet, valid for january, 2023

The idea was for gamers to get a feeling what it meant to be a game developer, and as former PS2Linux user, having so many instead trying to make a PC out of Playstation is what killed the fun for Sony.

I’m assuming their “threat model” wasn’t individual users going through sophisticated hoops to install their own hard drives.

More likely they wanted to make it difficult for grey-market vendors of unauthorized disk drives to escape cease and desist orders from Microsoft’s army of lawyers.

Probably helps they are a big OS company but I think they went all out on security because of how severe softmodding scene was on the original Xbox. IIRC there wasn't useful softmods for GameCube or PS2 during the lifetime of the system whereas I knew several people with modded Xboxes with larger drives that they'd rip rentals onto.

Xbox 360 also had XNA, I think you needed a paid membership to actually boot a game on it though. And on the last few Nintendo consoles they've had BASIC programs available letting you write your own software. Obviously there's some limitations there but people have done some neat stuff and it's even possible to do 3D. The original Famicom also had BASIC available.

I think they focused on it somewhat more after the 8 or so huge amateur security flaws on the original Xbox

Xbone is not hacked because nobody care about essentially a boring pc without any memorable games. It will remain in history as another Microsoft marketing disaster. One day it will eventually and silently destroyed to be emulated like all ancient arcades and microcomputer games protections. Every protection can and will be broken. Regarding unsuccessful money grab, Idea that Microsoft minds forsaw that people will want to upgrade their boxes with cheap generic parts and that must be punished is indeed new, no car manufacturers never did anything like that since 90s.

> Xbone is not hacked because nobody care about essentially a boring pc without any memorable games.

No, it's because MS gave them the keys right out of the gate with Dev Mode.

The keys couldn't unlock the GPU door though (I mean, dev mode apps couldn't use the graphics api). And iirc ram was limited. To me that allows for some incentive to root/jailbreak the device.

Anyway mission successful

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