8 ms·

Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story [video]

126 points by transpute 7y ago

transpute 7y ago
First time this material was published outside of Microsoft. Some points from the talk: - custom 28nm AMD CPU - off-die devices distrusted - encrypted memory - physical threat model: 10-game budget - pre-PSP "Secure Processor" - custom SP firmware by MS - minimal hypervisor - subset of Windows - secure boot & remote attestation - Azure Sphere Pluton = Xbox derivative
MonadIsPronad 7y ago
I can't help but feel this is a little "Boring Dystopia": he's demonstrating "Hey, here's how we keep people fiddling with the thing that they own, because it's bad for business". Decidedly unsettling.
- tapoxi 7y ago
  There's plenty of opportunities to buy open hardware. The benefit of a closed platform is that it enables selling the hardware at a loss (money is made on games) and it prevents cheating that is rampant on the PC.
  - reificator 7y ago
    > it prevents cheating that is rampant on the PC. Cheating does happen on PC. I've seen it maybe twice in the last 15 years. Wouldn't call that rampant. Losing at a video game does not mean your opponent is a cheater. This might sound dismissive but the number of times I was called a cheater when barely managing to win has me convinced that people just don't like losing.
    - skyyler 7y ago
      I'm going to assume that you and the person you are replying to play different games, potentially in different genres entirely. Some games have lots of cheaters. Some don't have any.
      - reificator 7y ago
        I'm told cheaters run rampant in Dark Souls. Never seen one, and that's one of my favorite games of all time. I've lost invasions many a time, and people have used advanced magic, endgame weapons, all that on me. Doesn't mean they cheated, new game plus is a thing, and the summoning levels (and now weapon matchmaking) are easily gamed to allow you to invade people less well-equipped than you are. I've seen videos of actual cheaters, who hit you with a homing soulmass and it breaks all your equipped weapons and armor. Or they never run out of stamina. Or whatever. But I've never seen one in person, and I've wasted far too much of my life on that game.
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      You must not play much PC. EVERY PC game has cheaters these days.
      - reificator 7y ago
        Again, I'd have more sympathy if I hadn't been called a cheater myself so many times for shooting the other dude before they shot me. I don't think most people know how to evaluate who is cheating and who is not, and it's taken as fact that cheaters are rampant so claims of cheating are believed by default. I'm definitely not saying that cheats don't exist, or that people don't use them. I'm saying the community at large appears to have jumped on the problem as a way to save face. "Oh he beat me, but it's only because he's wallhacking!"
        GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        To be clear, I am not calling all the god-like players I get owned by hackers. However, I am calling the god-like players who own me hackers, when I watch their kill-cam jump rapidly to each persons head with absolutely precision shot for shot. It gets into an area of response time where the human feedback loop takes longer than the response-and-inputs being delivered.
      - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
        I've got like 800 hours in TF2, and I've seen noticeable cheaters maybe 3 times. Getting accused of being a cheater is actually more common. One time some guy spent 10 minutes frantically trying to convince everyone that I was aimbotting...on Pyro. I wasn't even doing that well.
        reificator 7y ago
        I mean, human beings are incapable of pressing W and Mouse1 simultaneously, you'd have to have used an aimbot to play Pyro well. That's exactly what I'm talking about though. The fact that cheats exist is used to save face when people are losing (or even not winning by a large enough margin) in a video game. It's okay to lose in a video game. I do it all the time. There's no shame, you don't have to make excuses, it's a game.
    - rkangel 7y ago
      > Cheating does happen on PC. I've seen it maybe twice in the last 15 years. Wouldn't call that rampant. I think I can safely say that every competitive online game with a sizeable player base has a cheating problem. How bad that problem is varies - my impression is that Overwatch is pretty good (I've never noticed cheaters, only heard reports), whereas Rainbow 6 Siege is much worse - I have noticed cheaters several times and have had MMR awarded due to matches lost to people later banned for cheating.
      - reificator 7y ago
        Played R6 for the first six or so months after it released, whenever I could get my friends to join in. Can't say I ever saw a cheater there. Never played Overwatch, didn't interest me. I'm told that Dark Souls is the perfect storm of peer-to-peer and trusting clients, but I've only seen videos of cheaters, never in-person. And I've created many characters purely for invasions and summoning. Amusingly enough, one of the two times I referenced above was actually in Minecraft of all places. We started noticing one player getting resources far faster than everyone else, faster than was reasonable for even a very good/lucky player. I mean multiple nether stars in the span of half an hour, that kind of thing. I think they were filling up books and that somehow let them duplicate items.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      I dunno, I don't think I've ever seen or ever will see cheating as bad as I used to see again on the diablo 2 open battlenet servers. That shit was the wild west. There was no game any more it was only cheating and even if you used the basic hacking tools and made yourself some godly equipment it still wasn't good enough to defeat the people with the ridiculously hacked ultra game crashing godly equipment.
      - marblar 7y ago
        GTA 5 Online
  - EvanAnderson 7y ago
    The hardware could support a physical interlock, like Chromebooks and developer mode, that causes the machine to be unable to make attestations that it's running in its default trusted mode. It's not as if trusted execution systems are required by some law of physics to also exclude owner control complete. Just make the mode switch between owner-control and manufacturer-control one that assures that untrusted state can't be maintained when the mode switches back to manufacturer-controlled. re: the business model - Put a price on flipping that mode switch. That solves the business model problem too.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  I side on this issue with MS. He even brings this up in the talk, mentioning Dreamcast. How it died early on, because of piracy - developers didn't want to produce games for dreamcast - so no one bought console because no one made games for it. Its a vicious cycle that cannot be stopped otherwise.
  - realusername 7y ago
    There's plenty of counter points to that, Nintendo hardware is generally busted wide open pretty early. There's a very active Switch homebrew community right now and even very advanced emulators already capable of running commercial titles. It seems that it did not affect in any way the console commercially.
  - moviuro 7y ago
    I didn't quite understand how Dreamcast died. Recent studies and company show that piracy isn't that much of an issue. The real added value is the confidence you can have that the player can't cheat - which is good for online competitive games. The Dreamcast was killed because of the PS2, according to Wikipedia (but I'm not knowledgeable about the issue). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com https://www.mcvuk.com/no-evidence-that-piracy-affects-video-game-sales-eu-commission/ https://www.mcvuk.com/no-evidence-that-piracy-affects-video-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
  - toast0 7y ago
    The Dreamcast did have a short life, and was subject to simple piracy. However, there may not be a causal relationship there. Sega had a tricky financial situation and consumer trust issues because of their last 1.5 platforms (Saturn and 32X). EA did not support the platform because Sega wouldn't give them an exclusive license for sports games. The Playstation 2 had an unbelievably huge hype train before release. The cord for the controller came out of the wrong side. The economy was getting weird. If piracy was a big issue, I think Sega would have sold more hardware, and the software sales would have been low, but Wikipedia says the hardware sales were low, and the software sold 8-1 with consoles.
terramex 7y ago
> This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. > In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. While Xbox' technical security measures are very interesting, I dare to say that most effective measure was allowing to install homebrew apps by end users[0]. The only use for cracking Xbox One would be to enable piracy and exploit creators are almost universally against that. Also, PS4 has been jailbroken up to firmware 5.07 (patched in March 2018), and it is known that exploits for newer firmwares exist but are not (yet?) publicly available. [0] https://github.com/wiired24/ProjectPegasus/blob/master/binaries/Installing APPX Packages.pdf
- naner 7y ago
  The only use for cracking Xbox One would be to enable piracy That's not strictly true, cracking could also allow alternative os loading.
  - jsight 7y ago
    That is a good point... I bet there is nothing else as powerful at the price point either. It would make an excellent Linux media server.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      Sony advertised this as a feature of the PS3 called "OtherOS" and then got sued when they turned around and removed it with a software update. Settlement was supposedly $65 but it looks like affected people got a whole $10 for their trouble: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/9izcpm/has_anyone_received_the_65_from_the_ps3_sony/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/9izcpm/has_anyone_rece... There were some clusters made out of PS3s, presumably the operators kept these from updating, but they wouldn't be able to replace failed units with new ones anymore: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linux-hurts-the-air-force/?comments=1 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linu...
      - 7y ago
Simon_says 7y ago
How can I watch the video?
- Goz3rr 7y ago
  By opening the link OP posted? There's an embedded youtube video right there on the page.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Does the page not render for you with an enormous youtube embed in the middle? here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    Not for me. Just a big empty space where it should be.
    - resoluteteeth 7y ago
      Are you using umatrix or something?
      - Simon_says 7y ago
        Firefox Focus on mobile.
- anonymfus 7y ago
  youtube-dl -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a] -o "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo start "" "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4"
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    Just a friendly reminder to everyone, don't copy and paste commands into the terminal. There could be invisible characters that can execute unwanted operations. Explanation/example: https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste Previous HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554679 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508225
baybal2 7y ago
I call all those posh sounding "platform security" types being much like "antivirus" makers, trying to sell a non-solution for a problem to technical illiterates. What they claim sounds impressive to CEOs and such, but everybody in the industry knows that anybody with straight hands can probe a chip, and somebody with ion beam equipment can do pretty much anything he wants with it. For example, chips from credit cards, said to be "physically impossible" to tamper with, are known to be copied by somebody in Eastern Europe. If somebody becomes a victim of credit card cloning, proving the bank that it was not you who withdrew money on other side of the globe becomes nearly impossible without going to a court.
- rkangel 7y ago
  In the real world, security is not an absolute. Nothing is perfectly secure. What is important is the resources required to break the security - what that bar needs to be depends on your product and your business goals. In the video he specifically talks about an economic threshold - it must cost more than 10 games ($600) to mod a console. Above that price it's not worth it, so direct chip beam attacks aren't relevant to their threat model. That is the direct 'resource requirement' as a result of their business goal - prevent piracy.
  - zxcmx 7y ago
    I agree with your general point but computers are weird. Attacks and exploits can have scaling properties much like other software. We can do something expensive (say $200k attack cost) to break the platform and sell 10k $100 mod chips. The defender's threat model can't discount expensive attacks; the constraint is that an expensive one-off attack must not enable a cheap bypass. This is hard!
  - baybal2 7y ago
    This would not do anything about the seed for DRM key being extracted. Those types would only need to get a single key to decrypt all downloads.
edm0nd 7y ago
If you're interested in this type of stuff, I recommend reading https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/ https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hacke...

126 points by transpute 7y ago

First time this material was published outside of Microsoft. Some points from the talk: - custom 28nm AMD CPU - off-die devices distrusted - encrypted memory - physical threat model: 10-game budget - pre-PSP "Secure Processor" - custom SP firmware by MS - minimal hypervisor - subset of Windows - secure boot & remote attestation - Azure Sphere Pluton = Xbox derivative

MonadIsPronad 7y ago

I can't help but feel this is a little "Boring Dystopia": he's demonstrating "Hey, here's how we keep people fiddling with the thing that they own, because it's bad for business". Decidedly unsettling.

tapoxi 7y ago
There's plenty of opportunities to buy open hardware. The benefit of a closed platform is that it enables selling the hardware at a loss (money is made on games) and it prevents cheating that is rampant on the PC.
- reificator 7y ago
  > it prevents cheating that is rampant on the PC. Cheating does happen on PC. I've seen it maybe twice in the last 15 years. Wouldn't call that rampant. Losing at a video game does not mean your opponent is a cheater. This might sound dismissive but the number of times I was called a cheater when barely managing to win has me convinced that people just don't like losing.
  - skyyler 7y ago
    I'm going to assume that you and the person you are replying to play different games, potentially in different genres entirely. Some games have lots of cheaters. Some don't have any.
    - reificator 7y ago
      I'm told cheaters run rampant in Dark Souls. Never seen one, and that's one of my favorite games of all time. I've lost invasions many a time, and people have used advanced magic, endgame weapons, all that on me. Doesn't mean they cheated, new game plus is a thing, and the summoning levels (and now weapon matchmaking) are easily gamed to allow you to invade people less well-equipped than you are. I've seen videos of actual cheaters, who hit you with a homing soulmass and it breaks all your equipped weapons and armor. Or they never run out of stamina. Or whatever. But I've never seen one in person, and I've wasted far too much of my life on that game.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    You must not play much PC. EVERY PC game has cheaters these days.
    - reificator 7y ago
      Again, I'd have more sympathy if I hadn't been called a cheater myself so many times for shooting the other dude before they shot me. I don't think most people know how to evaluate who is cheating and who is not, and it's taken as fact that cheaters are rampant so claims of cheating are believed by default. I'm definitely not saying that cheats don't exist, or that people don't use them. I'm saying the community at large appears to have jumped on the problem as a way to save face. "Oh he beat me, but it's only because he's wallhacking!"
      - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        To be clear, I am not calling all the god-like players I get owned by hackers. However, I am calling the god-like players who own me hackers, when I watch their kill-cam jump rapidly to each persons head with absolutely precision shot for shot. It gets into an area of response time where the human feedback loop takes longer than the response-and-inputs being delivered.
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      I've got like 800 hours in TF2, and I've seen noticeable cheaters maybe 3 times. Getting accused of being a cheater is actually more common. One time some guy spent 10 minutes frantically trying to convince everyone that I was aimbotting...on Pyro. I wasn't even doing that well.
      - reificator 7y ago
        I mean, human beings are incapable of pressing W and Mouse1 simultaneously, you'd have to have used an aimbot to play Pyro well. That's exactly what I'm talking about though. The fact that cheats exist is used to save face when people are losing (or even not winning by a large enough margin) in a video game. It's okay to lose in a video game. I do it all the time. There's no shame, you don't have to make excuses, it's a game.
  - rkangel 7y ago
    > Cheating does happen on PC. I've seen it maybe twice in the last 15 years. Wouldn't call that rampant. I think I can safely say that every competitive online game with a sizeable player base has a cheating problem. How bad that problem is varies - my impression is that Overwatch is pretty good (I've never noticed cheaters, only heard reports), whereas Rainbow 6 Siege is much worse - I have noticed cheaters several times and have had MMR awarded due to matches lost to people later banned for cheating.
    - reificator 7y ago
      Played R6 for the first six or so months after it released, whenever I could get my friends to join in. Can't say I ever saw a cheater there. Never played Overwatch, didn't interest me. I'm told that Dark Souls is the perfect storm of peer-to-peer and trusting clients, but I've only seen videos of cheaters, never in-person. And I've created many characters purely for invasions and summoning. Amusingly enough, one of the two times I referenced above was actually in Minecraft of all places. We started noticing one player getting resources far faster than everyone else, faster than was reasonable for even a very good/lucky player. I mean multiple nether stars in the span of half an hour, that kind of thing. I think they were filling up books and that somehow let them duplicate items.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    I dunno, I don't think I've ever seen or ever will see cheating as bad as I used to see again on the diablo 2 open battlenet servers. That shit was the wild west. There was no game any more it was only cheating and even if you used the basic hacking tools and made yourself some godly equipment it still wasn't good enough to defeat the people with the ridiculously hacked ultra game crashing godly equipment.
    - marblar 7y ago
      GTA 5 Online
- EvanAnderson 7y ago
  The hardware could support a physical interlock, like Chromebooks and developer mode, that causes the machine to be unable to make attestations that it's running in its default trusted mode. It's not as if trusted execution systems are required by some law of physics to also exclude owner control complete. Just make the mode switch between owner-control and manufacturer-control one that assures that untrusted state can't be maintained when the mode switches back to manufacturer-controlled. re: the business model - Put a price on flipping that mode switch. That solves the business model problem too.
me_me_me 7y ago
I side on this issue with MS. He even brings this up in the talk, mentioning Dreamcast. How it died early on, because of piracy - developers didn't want to produce games for dreamcast - so no one bought console because no one made games for it. Its a vicious cycle that cannot be stopped otherwise.
- realusername 7y ago
  There's plenty of counter points to that, Nintendo hardware is generally busted wide open pretty early. There's a very active Switch homebrew community right now and even very advanced emulators already capable of running commercial titles. It seems that it did not affect in any way the console commercially.
- moviuro 7y ago
  I didn't quite understand how Dreamcast died. Recent studies and company show that piracy isn't that much of an issue. The real added value is the confidence you can have that the player can't cheat - which is good for online competitive games. The Dreamcast was killed because of the PS2, according to Wikipedia (but I'm not knowledgeable about the issue). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com https://www.mcvuk.com/no-evidence-that-piracy-affects-video-game-sales-eu-commission/ https://www.mcvuk.com/no-evidence-that-piracy-affects-video-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
- toast0 7y ago
  The Dreamcast did have a short life, and was subject to simple piracy. However, there may not be a causal relationship there. Sega had a tricky financial situation and consumer trust issues because of their last 1.5 platforms (Saturn and 32X). EA did not support the platform because Sega wouldn't give them an exclusive license for sports games. The Playstation 2 had an unbelievably huge hype train before release. The cord for the controller came out of the wrong side. The economy was getting weird. If piracy was a big issue, I think Sega would have sold more hardware, and the software sales would have been low, but Wikipedia says the hardware sales were low, and the software sold 8-1 with consoles.

terramex 7y ago

> This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. > In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. While Xbox' technical security measures are very interesting, I dare to say that most effective measure was allowing to install homebrew apps by end users[0]. The only use for cracking Xbox One would be to enable piracy and exploit creators are almost universally against that. Also, PS4 has been jailbroken up to firmware 5.07 (patched in March 2018), and it is known that exploits for newer firmwares exist but are not (yet?) publicly available. [0] https://github.com/wiired24/ProjectPegasus/blob/master/binaries/Installing APPX Packages.pdf

naner 7y ago
The only use for cracking Xbox One would be to enable piracy That's not strictly true, cracking could also allow alternative os loading.
- jsight 7y ago
  That is a good point... I bet there is nothing else as powerful at the price point either. It would make an excellent Linux media server.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    Sony advertised this as a feature of the PS3 called "OtherOS" and then got sued when they turned around and removed it with a software update. Settlement was supposedly $65 but it looks like affected people got a whole $10 for their trouble: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/9izcpm/has_anyone_received_the_65_from_the_ps3_sony/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/9izcpm/has_anyone_rece... There were some clusters made out of PS3s, presumably the operators kept these from updating, but they wouldn't be able to replace failed units with new ones anymore: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linux-hurts-the-air-force/?comments=1 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linu...
    - 7y ago

Simon_says 7y ago

How can I watch the video?

Goz3rr 7y ago
By opening the link OP posted? There's an embedded youtube video right there on the page.
Dylan16807 7y ago
Does the page not render for you with an enormous youtube embed in the middle? here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
- Simon_says 7y ago
  Not for me. Just a big empty space where it should be.
  - resoluteteeth 7y ago
    Are you using umatrix or something?
    - Simon_says 7y ago
      Firefox Focus on mobile.
anonymfus 7y ago
youtube-dl -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a] -o "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo start "" "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4"
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  Just a friendly reminder to everyone, don't copy and paste commands into the terminal. There could be invisible characters that can execute unwanted operations. Explanation/example: https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste Previous HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554679 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508225

baybal2 7y ago

I call all those posh sounding "platform security" types being much like "antivirus" makers, trying to sell a non-solution for a problem to technical illiterates. What they claim sounds impressive to CEOs and such, but everybody in the industry knows that anybody with straight hands can probe a chip, and somebody with ion beam equipment can do pretty much anything he wants with it. For example, chips from credit cards, said to be "physically impossible" to tamper with, are known to be copied by somebody in Eastern Europe. If somebody becomes a victim of credit card cloning, proving the bank that it was not you who withdrew money on other side of the globe becomes nearly impossible without going to a court.

rkangel 7y ago
In the real world, security is not an absolute. Nothing is perfectly secure. What is important is the resources required to break the security - what that bar needs to be depends on your product and your business goals. In the video he specifically talks about an economic threshold - it must cost more than 10 games ($600) to mod a console. Above that price it's not worth it, so direct chip beam attacks aren't relevant to their threat model. That is the direct 'resource requirement' as a result of their business goal - prevent piracy.
- zxcmx 7y ago
  I agree with your general point but computers are weird. Attacks and exploits can have scaling properties much like other software. We can do something expensive (say $200k attack cost) to break the platform and sell 10k $100 mod chips. The defender's threat model can't discount expensive attacks; the constraint is that an expensive one-off attack must not enable a cheap bypass. This is hard!
- baybal2 7y ago
  This would not do anything about the seed for DRM key being extracted. Those types would only need to get a single key to decrypt all downloads.

edm0nd 7y ago

If you're interested in this type of stuff, I recommend reading https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/ https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hacke...