Slashdot Mirror
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.
Doesn't this violate the DMCA?
Doesn't everything?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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
Inconceivable!
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
Hopefully, this is yet one more step in fully hacking the X-Box (can't tell because the site's been /.ed)
And I don't meant the usual Playstation-like hacking. I couldn't care less about not having to pay for games...
What I can't wait for are things like a DiVX player (DivX movies on TV!), Linux -> and with it all those wonderful applications, DVD Movies without the hardware adapter, etc. and all of this for only 200 bucks!
Many Dreamcasts were sold because of their hacking potential...just imagine what an X-Box is capable of! This, more than any reason, is why I'm hoping the X-Box pulls through and "makes it" among the video game platforms...
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.
the "security holes" this paper are about refer to the authors techniques for breaking the protection of the "secret" boat loader that MS employs.
it's just his take on where the security could have been improved. all in all MS looks to have relied on the security through obscurity approach (hiding the true boot loader behind a dummy boot loader), just that their obscurity fails when you monitor traffic over a bus with a simple card.
PS: dreamcasts and playstations have always been hackable, as is the xbox, no real surprise there.
I have two answers to this.
1) Sure. Would you want some script kiddie to delete a saved game you've spent many hours working on? While it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, it would be frustrating.
2) Microsoft intends the XBox to be the first of a larger presence in the family home. Imagine when everything in your house runs through the XBox (or similiar device) as MS ultimately envisions. Would you want B1FF to be able to get control over your home security system? Your climate control? Banking info? I wouldn't.
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
...that we will be able to play NetHack on the xbox?
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Then why wouldn't DeCSS fall into that category? I'd say that was a pretty good research project.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
What'd they do, remove IE?
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
OK, I've skimmed the PDF, and while the words "security holes in the XBox" in the article may lead you to think about traditional software buffer-overflow-I've-r00ted-your-box types of security holes... this article is about HARDWARE!! The PDF talks about hacking the hardware and getting around the encryption on the bootloader to be able to load your OS of choice, for example.
Meanwhile I'm reading posts from people who are nearly soiling themselves afraid to plug their XBox into a network for fear of being r00ted. What a joke. I bet when michael saw the words "XBox" and 'security hole' in the same sentence, he became so excited and nervous that he could hardly move his finger to click the button on the mouse. Sheesh.
I got a grudging thumbs up, so to speak, from Microsoft on my Xbox reverse engineering work
I think I'd much rather he post what must've been a very entertaining conversation with a Microsoft spokesperson than the bios to the XBox.
So no need to worry about DDoS or lost savegames. This is about playing unauthorized games, making a DiVX player etc.
Microsoft, not content with just SOFTWARE security holes, has now moved on to HARDWARE security holes.
I read that article and found it very interesting. It seems there's always a weakness in any security system, and a clever person with time on their hands can find it.
But then it hits me: this "security" is to keep THE OWNER, the PAYING CUSTOMER, out of the product he bought. This "security" doesn't protect my family, me, or my possessions from absolutely anything. It serves no purpose except to make work for somebody at Microsoft and then somebody at MIT. If they left it out, they'd save both parties a lot of effort. I'm sure someone will build on this article and figure out how to easily run arbitrary code on the Xbox, and so the security will be a total waste. So why is it there?
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
He now understands the boot process, and can mess with it via hardware mods. But he has only the decryption key, which is the public key of the pair. To make a bootable disc, you need the encrypting (private) key, which is nowhere in the XBox. That key probably exists only in a vault in Redmond.
I don't really care all that much about the XBox, but if the RIAA and MPAA have their way, all audio and video equipment will be protected like this.
I guess I am naive here. What is the point of making the X-box or any other game console hard to hack?
I used to believe the old saw that compared game consoles to razors; lose money on the console, make up for it on the games. But I read something recently which seemed (to me) to prove that everyone except M$ was making money on consoles too. So although it might make sense for M$ to prevent hacking for use as other than a game console, why would others do so?
Is it to prevent people from playing ill-gotten copies of games?
Is it to prevent cheating while playing a game?
Is it to prevent reverse engineering of a game?
I guess I just don't get it!
Infuriate left and right
My XBox web server is vulnerable? I guess I'll just have to download a patch from windows update!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If there were a way of loading GNU/Linux or one of the BSDs onto the X-Box, you'd essentially have a working computer system subsidized by the company currently doing the most to harm free software.
Ironically it might even keep the platform "alive" for the users. The business model for the X-Box is screwed, and based on what MS *thought* other console manufacturers were doing rather than what they really are doing. Sony and Nintendo, and Sega for most of its life, sell consoles at cost, and make profits from the games. Someone somewhere decided that "at cost" meant "at a loss" and Microsoft thought that the success of console manufacturers apparently using an "at a loss" business model meant they could potentially succeed at it too.
Sega switched to the "at a loss" model, largely through desperation, and the consequence was that Sega became a publisher, not a manufacturer, because it couldn't subsidize the consoles, it didn't work. Microsoft may have deeper pockets, but few companies will chase an unrealistic business model just for the sake the chasing it, and Microsoft is left with a choice of continuing, and not gaining anything; selling the X-Box at cost in which case it will be substantially more expensive than its competition and probably will not achieve the type of market share Microsoft wants for it, or to drop the project for now and come up with a better idea.
Given Microsoft's past history, I'd say the last of these options is the most likely. This leaves current X-Box users with machines that will be quickly seen as "obsolete" and "unsupported", and while Microsoft will doubtless try to cut its losses by supporting them, I suspect it'll be more and more difficult to get X-Box support through means other than mail order as time goes on.
A project to open the X-Box, and turn it into a real PC, which is what getting the Linux kernel running on the X-Box could achieve, would help the end users, even if it wouldn't help Microsoft.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sure - but one could easily argue that its main purpose is to keep pirates from running unauthorized (copied) programs on it
and to keep developers from building their own executables without real dev kits (and depriving ms of royalties)
and it keeps game hack systems out - like the gameshark and the codebreaker like devices from running.
And before you bitch and moan about MS being a bunch of bastards - almost every game system that ever came along has had some system to keep developers, hackers, and users from explointing the technology inside. Even Atari was that way - mostly through Atari not releasing all the specs for programming it so their games could look better in comparision - and they sued the first company who dared defy them (I think it was sierra).
Yes, you know a guy has really made it in the world when he has a blonde girlfriend. (Not a cheap knockoff, or just a very light brunette, but a genuine, certified blonde.)