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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."
But -
Won't we have demo disks released soon enough? I doubt OXM, among other publications, will pass up on making demo disks.
Besides, can't demos and media be downloaded from Xbox Live as is? I didn't get my hands on a 360, but this is what I've heard.
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Does the existence of hate crime laws means I am free to kill other white guys?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
However, becuase of the very nature of this disk (restricted kiosk) it is unlikely that 99% of people will be able to make backup copies of it under fair use.
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The first step in breaking the Dreamcast was finding a loophole that let it boot from plain CD-R.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
If you try the 360's demo downloading capability, you know that it can run downloaded content. I haven't sniffed the data stream myself, but encrypted connections slow servers down quite a bit and it's doubtful that xbox live servers even use them for content download on the order of a 500MB demo. Those binaries are signed just like the demos on the discs which can be burned. By signing the binaries, they don't need to worry about how the code got on the xbox. DVD-R, download, remove hard drive->write binary->reinstall hard drive, iPod, it doesn't matter a bit. If it doesn't execute binaries that aren't signed by microsoft's private key, it doesn't matter how you give it the binary, it won't run it. This is a non-story. Unless someone steals or or breaks microsoft's private key, this is gonna need a hardware hack at minimum.
To reiterate what others have said, the executables are still signed AND demo discs with no media checks have been around for months. So that rules out modifying the executables.
As far as gamesave exploits and the like...On the original Xbox, gamesaves were signed, but they used a key stored in plaintext in the executable. Meaning if you found a way to crash the game and run your code, it was trivial to get the game to accept it. I suspect on the Xbox 360 the key will be secret.
Secondly, games on the Xbox run in kernel mode. I suspect this is NOT be the case on the Xbox 360.
The Xbox 360 does not use an off-the-shelf CPU. Microsoft licensed it and built its own. The original Xbox was first hacked because it used an off-the-shelf Mobile Celeron and thus its secret information had to be built into the Xbox-specific southbridge and travel down the HyperTransport, which could be sniffed. Since the Xbox 360 used an MS-made CPU, I would wager that the key is on the CPU itself.
If we presume that gamesaves are signed with a secret key in the CPU, and applications do not run in kernel mode, we can rule out gamesave exploits in addition to executable modifications.
In short, this "news" is pointless. MS ship an executable with a few different bits allowing DVD-R playback and people suddenly think that we have a new Dreamcast on our hands. The disc will undoubtedly be subject to much scrutiny, but we're not really any closer to hacking the Xbox 360.