Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story (2019)

platformsecuritysummit.com

14 points·michaelt··6 comments

I enjoyed this video, because one line of conventional thinking says if an attacker has access to your physical hardware, it's game over for security. And other parts of the tech industry envisage things like TPMs and Secure Boot protecting PCs and laptops against attackers with physical access.

Games consoles aim to prevent piracy/cheat modchips, even though the device owner has physical access and legal ownership. The levels Microsoft had to go to to prevent such attacks are something to behold.

its definately not something you do in your basement, while yelling at mom to get you a pepsi.

a sufficiently motivated attacker would collect hardware, parts, and specs, then build thier own hardware platform with an open architecture.

The reward has to be on par with the effort required, and i dont think the reward is there for most people that have the skill to reverse the hardware.

There's a big business use case for this technology in the laptop market too, corporate espionage is a real thing and this can reduce the likely effects of e.g. someone breaking into an employees hotel room.

Previous 2019 thread with some more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325421 (52 comments)

This is a deep and rewarding area of research and one that I think will be even bigger in the future, as software on IoT becomes a thing.

Interesting timing, given that the PS4 has been hacked via various exploits, and the PS5 has just had its root encryption keys exposed.

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