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Technical Analysis of XBox Save Game Hack
DJPenguin writes "There is an excellent article at the XBox Linux Project that describes exactly how the XBox savegame hack works. It details how the author went to great lengths to hide exactly what was going on. It turns out the exploit code is hidden within an image of Tux himself!" An enlightening read, to say the least.
The code was "hidden" in the jfif header, therefore does not qualify as steganography in my opinion. But I bet MS jumps all over this and gets stego banned.
The code is just brilliant. A lot of care was taken in the construction of this hack. No script kiddie is he.
It looks like it retrives the private key. That's interesting.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Nah, this is still just a buffer overflow. I doubt he "put" it in there.
I think that any programmer can appreciate why he went to such lengths to hide the code. It's a hell of a cool thing to do.
In this world of script kiddies, it's very important to disguinish between kiddies and people who are true hackers. Mad props to him for showing that hacking is most certainly an art.
The modification of the public key to make is divisible by 3 was just beautiful.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
In this world of script kiddies, it's very important to disguinish between kiddies and people who are true hackers. Mad props to him for showing that hacking is most certainly an art.
/*" is not an artist, he's a criminal who should have his nuts ripped off - no matter how 1337 his 5ki11z are. Although the legality of hacking the X-Box is questionable, it's in a different world entirely from the vandalism associated with computer break-ins, and the community is doing this to a product they paid for and own.
Um, that's not a very good distinction: you need to be clear what meaning of "hacker" you're using. Someone who r00ts my box and types "rm -rf
By confusing the illicit modding and the website defacing, you're making it all the harder to defend against future DMCAs. Many of the big corporate lobbyists and lawyers we so love to bash on Slashdot would love for the public and politicians to view hobbyists and crackers as the same thing.
I'm sure the reason was to make it harder for others to use the same hack to play copied games.
Remember, they've already gone out of their way to stress it's use for a legitimate purpose (running Linux) and not for piracy. This is just one more example of that. It shows a good faith effort by the authors to insure the hack can't as easily be exploited for other purposes.
Conoles will stay consoles. They will be made to play purely games and nothing else. This is what people want to buy, and they're showing it with their pocketbooks right now. Look at how many dedicated gaming devices Sony and Nintendo have sold compared to Microsofts try-and-do-everything Box. The numbers speak for themselves.