6 ms·

Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on thei

Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in. https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448 The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.

NotPractical 3y ago
It seems surprising to me that they went from shipping a vulnerable WebKit with numerous public CVEs on day 1, to producing a more or less bulletproof OS?
graphe 3y ago
Xbone has no hacks. It has dev mode, no exclusives both which killed hacking and piracy.
- coretx 3y ago
  The PS3 had "OtherOS" for lucrative import/export levies. Saving a dime on removing it post sales and export/import is what lead to hacking & piracy.
- Jerrrry 3y ago
  yup, the "cat-and-mouse" game ended when they embedded the decryption key physically to the CPU. You can't read it without breaking it.
coretx 3y ago
"console security is getting really good." - It's not nor will it ever be. There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example. Developers aim for secure enough and don't care much about a single nerd who cracked his individual system using exotic specialists tools more valuable than the console and the entire game collection combined. It's more lucrative to just send a lawyer. ( Until it goes wrong. )
- jsheard 3y ago
  I would class making it uneconomical to hack a console for any practical purpose as "really good security". Could someone with nation-state resources hack the Xbox? Maybe? But who cares, they're not going to.
  - PUSH_AX 3y ago
    Tony Chen even addresses this directly in the video above. They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care. The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Another smart move by Microsoft was shipping Xboxes in an uninitialized state that has to connect to the internet and download the latest firmware before it can be used. Sony has been repeatedly burned by patching an exploit but having the vulnerable firmware still pre-installed on machines still in retail channels, so someone willing to abuse return policies can easily get one. MS doesn't need to worry about that, every new Xbox ends up on the latest firmware regardless of when it was manufactured.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    PS5 and XS was attractive hack target for crypto mining when it was boom and GPU were in shortage. I wonder anyone had hacked it (and keep it secret) or hadn't.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I felt called out in that YouTube video when the guy said 'This is what people do to not spend $60 on games'.
- grishka 3y ago
  $60 for a game is very expensive though. Especially so with digital distribution which means it can't be resold.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    It’s really not…
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      It really depends where you live eh.
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        Videogames are usually not made in cheap countries
        prmoustache 3y ago
        That is irrelevant to how affordable or not it is for the end user.
        bowsamic 3y ago
        If you can’t afford to pay for the labour to produce it, then why would you expect to be able to buy it?
        grishka 3y ago
        Here's the thing: if I can't afford a game because it's so outrageously expensive, I'm not going to just not play it and miss out, I'm going to pirate it. And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.

NotPractical 3y ago

It seems surprising to me that they went from shipping a vulnerable WebKit with numerous public CVEs on day 1, to producing a more or less bulletproof OS?

graphe 3y ago

Xbone has no hacks. It has dev mode, no exclusives both which killed hacking and piracy.

coretx 3y ago
The PS3 had "OtherOS" for lucrative import/export levies. Saving a dime on removing it post sales and export/import is what lead to hacking & piracy.
Jerrrry 3y ago
yup, the "cat-and-mouse" game ended when they embedded the decryption key physically to the CPU. You can't read it without breaking it.

coretx 3y ago

"console security is getting really good." - It's not nor will it ever be. There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example. Developers aim for secure enough and don't care much about a single nerd who cracked his individual system using exotic specialists tools more valuable than the console and the entire game collection combined. It's more lucrative to just send a lawyer. ( Until it goes wrong. )

jsheard 3y ago
I would class making it uneconomical to hack a console for any practical purpose as "really good security". Could someone with nation-state resources hack the Xbox? Maybe? But who cares, they're not going to.
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  Tony Chen even addresses this directly in the video above. They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care. The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Another smart move by Microsoft was shipping Xboxes in an uninitialized state that has to connect to the internet and download the latest firmware before it can be used. Sony has been repeatedly burned by patching an exploit but having the vulnerable firmware still pre-installed on machines still in retail channels, so someone willing to abuse return policies can easily get one. MS doesn't need to worry about that, every new Xbox ends up on the latest firmware regardless of when it was manufactured.
- fomine3 3y ago
  PS5 and XS was attractive hack target for crypto mining when it was boom and GPU were in shortage. I wonder anyone had hacked it (and keep it secret) or hadn't.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I felt called out in that YouTube video when the guy said 'This is what people do to not spend $60 on games'.

grishka 3y ago
$60 for a game is very expensive though. Especially so with digital distribution which means it can't be resold.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  It’s really not…
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    It really depends where you live eh.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      Videogames are usually not made in cheap countries
      - prmoustache 3y ago
        That is irrelevant to how affordable or not it is for the end user.
        bowsamic 3y ago
        If you can’t afford to pay for the labour to produce it, then why would you expect to be able to buy it?
        grishka 3y ago
        Here's the thing: if I can't afford a game because it's so outrageously expensive, I'm not going to just not play it and miss out, I'm going to pirate it. And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.