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Xbox 360 Kiosk Demo Spurs Hackers
An anonymous reader writes "Those hackers from team PI have released the Xbox 360 experience kiosk demo disc as an ISO. They say this demo contains no media protection and therefore it will run on the Xbox 360 when burned to a DVD-R disc. The disc contains playable demo's on the disk such as Call of Duty 2, which could also be hackable, as PI speculates."
They're out now! The January 2006 issue of OXM has a demo disk that works on both the original Xbox and the new Xbox 360. Probably possible because they both use different file extentions for the default file.
The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvwent the protection. Copyright infringement is still illegal on top of that. Creating/using DeCSS violates the DMCA, but copying the DVD is copyright infringment. The DMCA is "evil", but just because people don't protect something technologically doesn't mean you should have the right to copy it willy nilly.
Why not fork?
From what I saw on the magazine rack, OXM is already offering a disk with playable Xbox 360 demos. What is getting the hackers excitied is that the files on the demo disk are not encrypted, and they are signed to boot from seemingly any type of media. This disk can is going to be used by hackers to determine how the 360 authorizes a game to be booted and with what kind of media. They can know figure out what signals are different and produce a modchip that will allow backups to run. This is the second step in opening up the 360 to run any code. The first was figuring out the format files are laided out on the disk with, and this was cracked and reported on earlier.
There have been demo disks circulating for sometime (also media check free). So while these demo discs may have no media checks that doesn't mean that the executables are not signed.
As I understand it the media check basically lets the 360s hypervisor know what media the executable is allowed to run from. Demos do not have these media checks as they may be downloaded and run from the hard disk, or run from DVD.
Obviously only signed code was intended to be run on the machine, the absence of a media check does not mean the executable isn't signed. In fact anyone would be incredibly naive to think that the executables were not unsigned.
All in all I don't think we're any closer to modding the 360. This hacker group also released an Xbox 360 iso extraction tool which amounted to nothing. It turned out that any of the existing Xbox iso extraction tools could do the exact same thing. It's just alot of smoke and no fire.
Obviously only signed code was intended to be run on the machine, the absence of a media check does not mean the executable isn't signed. In fact anyone would be incredibly naive to think that the executables were not unsigned. That should read : In fact anyone would be incredibly naive to think that the executables were not signed.
What software are you using to perform the backup. Last time I checked (well over a year ago) it still was not possible to read and copy disks without downloading files from the xbox, then using GDFIMAGE to create the ISO. You could use UDF, but the end result could be any number of bad things. If you are doing direct copies, how are you dealing with the media checks?
As I recall, it has always been possible to create a backup of a backup.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I just changed one digit with a hex editor and re-burned the iso. The change was in Call of Duty. It no longer plays. The other demo's play just fine. No error message, it just locks up with a blank screen.
I am going to try again to verify. I will know in about 20 minutes.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Actually, Phantasy Star Online had a back door, not a buffer overflow. A packet that Sega called RcvProgramPatch could be sent to the client containing assembly code that the game would then execute. This allowed Sega to patch holes in the game and check for cheats, but it eventually led to the downfall of the Gamecube security system. (Dreamcast PSO had this feature as well, but Dreamcast had other security problems =) )
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager