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A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once
- TempleOS 12y agoHere's the plan. God talks to everybody. God explains the world is perfectly just. No more retard-niggers. Emporor has no cloths. If people steal from you then you stole because God is perfectly just. No more niggers. No more obsfucation.
- akinder 12y agoAnd an EE with too much time on his hands thought waaay too much of himself
- jstanek 12y agoHey, I think it's pretty cool, and I'd like to see a write-up of how he did it. Plus it's good advertising for their firm, assuming they don't get sued or anything.
- megablast 12y agoYou may be in the wrong place if you think there is anything wrong with technical people hacking away at software and hardware.
- amagumori 12y agohe's referring to the silly "you'll get your ass handed to you" tone of the post. it's ridiculously adversarial and self-aggrandizing. he might as well have written "tango down" after showing a reversed chip..
- rurounijones 12y ago> it's ridiculously adversarial and self-aggrandizing Well yeah, that is the whole point.
- smtddr 12y agoI would pay money to enroll in a class dedicated to game console hacking of this depth.
- trevyn 12y agoNot this depth, but pretty great anyway: http://www.sexviahex.com/ http://www.sexviahex.com/
- rasz_pl 12y ago$4K for learning how to dump a nand chip? Im clearly in the wrong business.
- ssclafani 12y agoCheck out Hacking the Xbox: http://www.nostarch.com/xboxfree http://www.nostarch.com/xboxfree It covers general reverse engineering techniques as well as going in depth into the original Xbox's security mechanisms.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y agoI agree this is a good one, thanks for bringing this up. I like how he's trying to avoid too much jargon, and really getting people to understand the subject, instead of showing off with his knowledge, which is all too common.
- smw 12y agoThis is now 404? Strange, maybe attention resulted in a DMCA takedown request?
- femto 12y agoIf you have money to spend, spend it on an instance of the console that you are interested in, then open it up and start figuring out how it works. (Google is your friend here.) One of the biggest barriers to learning about reverse engineering is fear of the expense of breaking the system you are working on. Being afraid of breakage makes one's exploration timid. In buying a system specifically for the purpose, you've removed the major barrier. Pulling something apart and figuring out how it works has to be the best way to learn about engineering. Every child (and curious adult) should do it, with children having the advantage of all the time in the world to do things. As you pull lots of things apart, you begin to learn about the full spectrum of current engineering techniques, eventually ending up with the knowledge to design your own stuff. It would be cool if there was a "Wikipedia" of reverse engineering, whereby every consumer item out there has a web of articles, and an army of the curious has fun by stripping devices down and collaboratively documenting innards to the lowest level possible. It would be extra cool if the community extended to a means of obtaining broken reverse engineering targets, that would otherwise be thrown away, or a way of spreading the cost of purchasing sacrificial devices. Such an effort would directly feed into Free Software efforts, by providing the knowledge required to rewrite replacement software, from scratch, for the devices in our lives. (For example, Free Software for your phone's modem processor, your washing machine, your fridge, your TV, ...?) Free Software for consumer appliances will come into prominence as every appliance in our lives, and their associated sensors, joins the "Internet Of Things".
- mey 12y agoI'd be interested in them doing a tear down of a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 or higher hardware security module. Basically systems designed to self-wipe on detection of tampering.
- usbreply 12y agoHave you seen the mikeselectricstuff youtube channel ? He did a teardown of a credit card reader. The "self wipe" functionality is implemented in a fairly simple way.
- iancarroll 12y agoHSMs are on an entirely different level compared to credit card readers. To OP, those devices are not cheap - they run $22k from SafeNet (dependent on what model, obviously). In addition, FIPS criteria is meant to be tamper evident (not tamper resistant). SafeNet does require a special key to recover after a tamper attempt, though: http://goo.gl/RyVtFj http://goo.gl/RyVtFj
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pzb 12y agoHSMs also vary by manufacturer. The SafeNet Luna you linked to has both tamper as the case level and tamper as the actual HSM level. If you read the FIPS documentation for the SafeNet Luna SA, it has a PCIe card inside with a cryptographic module on the card that is the core to the system. Tampering with that is ever more destructive than just opening the case.
- Nursie 12y agoDepends on the reader I think. I would be interested to see what he did there. Credit card readers get scored on how hard they are to attack, and pass above some threshold based on difficulty of attack and time taken.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
- usbreply 12y agoReverse engineering silicon seems to have become the new "hacking". Everyone's doing it. Perhaps its time to come up with a term to describe the hardware equivalent of "script kiddie" ?
- alexbecker 12y agoIs there such an equivalent? You can't C-C C-V hardware.
- wolfgke 12y agoBut perhaps in near future you'll be able to 3D print it - thus Ctrl-C Ctrl-V becomes possible for hardware.
- nemasu 12y agoooo, new terms! Ummmmmm...Wirer? (as in, the Arduino programming language).
- pakled_engineer 12y agoIf you look at the silikiddies bespoke services they are shilling customized hardware side channels. 5 Eyes Alliance already has shady engineers to do this, so I imagine all their customers are in the fields of bank fraud, insider trading and putting down rebellions in middle east Kingdoms.
- e12e 12y agoYes, this here is clearly no more sophisticated than downloading some random php-file off the net and brute-forcing access to a couple of wordpress blogs. /sarcasm To be more constructive: I don't even understand what you mean? I'd say this is more on par with implementing one's own OS kernel, than what I associate with being a "script kiddie". Sure, it's easy. Just a bit of C and assembler, and you can copy an existing design. Anyone with half a brain can do it...
- WatchDog 12y agoSome really cool pictures and very coy comments here. Id love learn more about the work these guys have done in reverse engineering these systems. Googling combinations of "WIZ Code" and "22.050Khz wobble" didn't yield anything, not even the misinformation referred to.
- rasz_pl 12y agohttp://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=128 http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=128
- pjc50 12y agoIs that really a small LCD wire-bonded to the top of the chip as a live readout device? That's a nifty trick.
- Luc 12y agoI think it's your nifty imagination, it's just the watermark on the image :)
- pjc50 12y agoPossibly, although in the first of these the green thing in the middle has half a watermark on (very visible) while the rest of the watermark extends to the right, and in the second I can clearly see bondwires running from the edge of the die to something brownish in the central area. It might be die-on-die packaged memory or something else part of the original, but I'd like to know what it is. http://weaponre.com/config/R8J328XX_Decapped_WM.jpg http://weaponre.com/config/R8J328XX_Decapped_WM.jpg http://weaponre.com/config/CXD5130R_Decap_WM.jpg http://weaponre.com/config/CXD5130R_Decap_WM.jpg
- Luc 12y agoIf I were to hazard a guess I'd say it's SRAM. Nice, regular columns of memory.
- scalayer 12y agoThis was a really fun read! Thanks for sharing!
- deutronium 12y agoThis looks very impressive! Could anyone explain what the R8J32710 chip is? I'm wondering what the data rate of bits across the bonding wires would be.
- AlyssaRowan 12y agoDSPs/SoCs usually used as optical disc drive controllers, for example in Blu-Ray drives. Three guesses why you might want to look inside one of those...