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Keeping Secrets in Hardware: Xbox Case Study
BS405397 writes "Here is the just released MIT whitepaper on the security holes in the MS X-Box, and for those who are interested, opens up the X-Box pretty nicely." Update: 06/04 17:13 GMT by M : The server appears to be down at the moment. There is a copy of the paper mirrored here. Reuters and other news outlets have now picked up the story, two days after Slashdot.
Here is the guys website (bunnie), with a ton of other hacking information not in the whitepaper.
He also has an alternative link to the paper.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I quote from a posting to XBOXHACKER that quotes "I did the work in february, but it took about three months to get it positioned and cleared with both MIT and Microsoft."
I guess that means the DMCA was not violated although the posting mentions that Microsoft intend on addressing these 'holes' in future revisions of XBOX hardware.
[)amien
Reverse engineering is legal under most circumstances. Prohibiting it would create a new form of intellectual property, which, unlike patents, would not have to be disclosed. Trade secrets are limited in scope; trade secret law is mostly about disclosure by people authorized to know the trade secret.
He frequents the Xbox hacker msesage boards. Heres what else he had to say about Microsoft in this post...
... hmm...patent search turns up nil on the Xbox...guess we'll just have to reverse engineer it. (FTR, Nintendo has patented what looks to be the entirety of the N64 console, thus perchance making reverse engineering an N64 illegal--not yet court tested.)"
"To answer some specific questions:
no, I will not publish the encryption key or the boot block. That's Microsoft copyright material, and I respect their copyright.
Microsoft is not particularly happy about the paper, but they seemed to concede that well, reverse engineering is protected by law, so there's nothing they can do about it. Let's hope they don't change their opinion...they've been known to go back on their word before. "
also, from his website...
"You are actually allowed by law to reverse engineer copyrighted code so long as it is necessary to discover the ideas or functional elements behind the code (still, I'm not allowed to post copyrighted code for free distribution). Hey, microsoft...what are the ideas and functional elements behind your BIOS ROM?
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Yeah, who would want a $200 general purpose computer wiuth built in ethernet and DVD capability? I mean, what are you going to do, get a keyboard working and have a $200 Linux machine that's comprable to most $800 boxen? Or get it to run DivX movies? Or network 5 of them into a $1000 Beowulf cluster?
It's not a gaming system. It's a computer that's been artificially limited to gaming. People want to break into it to remove those limitations, so they can have a very cheap, fairly powerful and flexible computer system.
The article -- the whole console hacking phenomenon -- is not about people breaking into your Xbox of ther internet. If you had read the article, you would have seen that it's about hacking the box to be able to boot custom code. There's no question of "reinstalling a few games" unless someone breaks into your house, reprograms the flash ROM in your Xbox, and turns it into a Linux machine.
-b
Does this mean I can hack into .. and upload a patch to display ... characters as completely nude, full-figured women?
No, but it does mean you can fabricate a little circuit board and solder it to tiny wires on the xbox, connect that to a FPGA and custom-program the FPGA to implement data collecting hardware (including a lot of hand-layout effort to make the FPGA able to collect at 200 MHz). It means you can implement a little state machine also in the FPGA to begin collecting at the right time, ignore a false reset pulse, and tag all collected data with sequence numbers of how many clock cycles elapsed between each data transfer and the CPU reset.
It also means you can spend a lot of time to do statistical analysis on the data and compare to patterns from the flash rom (which you presumably already extracted and read with your EPROM programmer). It means that once you've at least figured out which wires were which bits, you can begin wading through millions of data transfers and try to reconstruct an image of the code the CPU executed.
It means you can disassemble that code (remember, found from analyzing millions of bus transfers) and recognize that it implements RC-4 decryption. It means you can write a "brute force" attack to guess all possible 16-byte patters from the image you extracted and see if any of them decrypts the flash rom data to something other than white noise.
It means that, after all that, you have the algorithm and key used to decrypt the bootloader in the flash rom... and then you can write your own bootloader (by extracting the flash rom chip and changing its contents with an EPROM programmer) and make the xbox run your own code.
The author did mention that Microsoft put test points on the board to access the flash rom, so instead of physically removing the flash rom, you could build a "bed-of-nails" test fixture that you'd just place the xbox circuit board into to reprogram the flash rom (don't forget to design your own EPROM programmer in this process).
But as others have pointed out, the author has been in contact with Microsoft and they are aware of the problem, and they intend to fix it in future revisions to the xbox hardware.
So if you wanna pop up nudie pictures in the middle of someone's game, you'd better get started soldering now. Even after you do all this, you'd barely have your foot in the door. You'll need to do a massive reverse engineering job on the bootloader, and then the rest of the flash rom (which is presumably part of the win2k closed-source kernel). Somewhere along the way, you'll learn about the xbox hardware and MAYBE find a game-independent way to overlay some graphics on the screen. Maybe you'll even find some exploits in the kernel itself, maybe?
But to start, you MUST pull the flash rom chip and reprogram it with your own code. Better hurry before Microsoft changes the secret bootloader or even the hardware itself, now that they know of the weakness.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'm one of the sysadmins at the AI lab - we had a power shutdown in our building last night through much of today, but the site is back up and ready to get slashdotted.
As was mentioned in several posts, this is bad (for MS) because it may allow two things - non-authorized software development and pirated software. (don't mark me as redundant yet, keep reading :)
That's why Nintendo stuck with cartridges and why they now have a non-standard format for Gamecube games. I am really surprised other console developers haven't done this.... the slight increase in costs to slow piracy is a good trade-off.
Anyone know if it would be possible to burn those mini-dvd's that Nintendo uses?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.