this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 30 points 9 months ago (3 children)

You're being downvoted because this is a hardware problem and not Microsoft's fault.

Just look at the Xbox one mod chip scene and you'll see MS can do security perfectly well.

Yeah. I hate Microsoft as a company, and I hate how they inject advertising, inconsistent design, no good centralixed package manager (TBF, they're fixing that with winget, but only kind of; not sure if there's a way to add additional repositories), etc.

But they do have damn good security. After the OG Xbox became the legendary homebrew console that it did, Microsoft beefed up security massively with the Xbox 360's software. What they didn't do quite as well was beef up hardware security, although the last model of the Xbox 360 (Winchester) has yet to be hacked. The JTAG hack was patched with a firmware update, but then it was found that through a timed glitching attack, you could force memcmp to return true, and if the timing is off, you can reboot the console via glitcher chip or SMC if using RGH 3 and try again.

With the Xbox One, there was a priviledge escillation bug in Dev Mode that to this day has been pretty underutilized, but other than that, it's been fairly rock solid. There is another point to why, though. Microsoft realised the power of homebrew, especially after Sony made the mistake of removing OtherOS from all PS3 models, and then it got hacked shortly after. So they included (sold you) a way to run UWP apps using a sandboxed environment called Dev Mode. This leaves less of a desire for hackers to attempt exploiting the console's retail mode, since they have almost the same resources that games have (still weaker, though).

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Don’t know anything about that scene, has it ever been cracked?

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nope. Never. It's pretty impressive.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

IIRC AMD is inplementing it in their Ryzen 6000 CPUs.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

Not the Xbox One. The 360 had some wild mod chips back in the day, which actually required drilling into the CPU at a specific spot to cut some internal contacts. Basically, the 360 used a physical connection between two pins on the CPU for security. So the modchip required drilling into the CPU, to sever that connection and allow the modchip to inject its own code instead. That’s when MS (mostly) realized that relying on physical connections for security was a bad idea, because an end user has physical access to the device.