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Hackers Dodge Xbox Live Shutout
An Ars Technica post at their games column Opposable Thumbs points out that, despite Microsoft's best efforts, hacked Xbox 360s are once again playing on Xbox Live. "Steadfast in their pursuits, the hackers of the Xbox 360 scene have managed to best Microsoft's Xbox Live Banning protocol: a system of checks in place to identify hacked Xbox 360s and deny them access to the Xbox Live Network. The current method of hacking the 360 involves exploiting the firmware of the DVD drive (the preferable method), and this latest patch does just that. In fact, the creators are so confident in their breakthrough that the info file remarks that the new firmware 'defeats all current and some future Xbox Live detection attempts.'"
The person you are about to shoot may be playing on a hacked xbox, Do you want to continue?
The hackers have more manpower than Microsoft. It's also worth noting that they're probably more skilled than the XBL engineers.
Even if Microsoft had 1000 people working on this, the hackers would still be ahead. It's impossible to estimate how many people take a shot at console hacking just for the hell of it.
Inevitably, the hackers dominate just about any platform. That's just the way it works.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
You know you want to click.
Uh, I assume if anyone can get this firmware then so can Microsoft. Their next update just won't use a method fixed by this hacked firmware.
As far as I know, the mod in question only allows users to play "backups" of games - not to run arbitrary code (including cheats). So the concerns of people cheating are a little off the mark. As is the idea that the detection could really be moved to the server side - any detection regimen is going to have to look at the drive's firmware or some characteristic of the disk and this looking is going to be done at the client end.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
People with hacked Xbox 360s still need to buy a new system in order to play online. So it's really not all that bad for Microsoft. When they defeat _this_ hack, then all people with those hacked boxes would have to buy yet another Xbox. What would really screw up Microsoft's banning efforts is if people managed to change their console IDs. Then banning a console ID would put a regular Xbox 360 out of commission, and the banned one would just change to a different good ID again.
50 bucks every damn year just to play online - add 250 bucks to the 400 you already spent.
No dedicated servers - laggy p2p networking, Microsoft isn't even hosting your games while forcing you to pay.
Gears of War - 8 player p2p laggy mess
Halo 3 - 16 player p2p laggy mess
If it wasn't for Nintendo's botched online for their stupid little Wii gimmick Microsoft would have the worst online of any major platform.
PC - free online, dedicated servers, 32, 64 player games
PS3 - free online, dedicated servers, 32, 40 player games
360 - yeeech...
It's good to read the hackers are continuing to fight for our rights to not only pirate (yeah, I know there are a lot of anti-pirate people here, I don't blame them one bit for being steadily opposed) games, but get access to the online community through a modded system. I've always wanted a modded console, but I know if that were to happen I would end up buying pratically nothing brand-new other than like maybe one or two games a year total across my systems, and I own every sytem except the wii. Even if I had to buy every single game I play from here on out, I have so many games to play waiting for me collecting dust or taking up HD space, I can easily wait for 90% of what comes out to drop in price or pick of used 6 mo to a year later for a signifigant fraction of what they cost new. If everyone was like me buying almost exclusively used or playing a lot of emulated retro titles, or even like the hardcore hacker/pirates (that don't buy anything at all anymnore cause they don't have to) the industry would change so much it would be hard to recognize. On the same hand, Pirates of the Carribean 3 the game will probably sell like ten times the numbers of copies sold of Psyconauts and Shin Megami Tensei 3 combined, so go figure..but I digress, pirating/hacking/modding will not be the death of the industry-just a continued challenge, and I love to read a bout a good digital brawl, being on the edge fringes of modding/piracy/emulation/backup stuff from decades ago to now.
Gaming for over 25 years
We're seeing Trusted Computing at its finest.
Trusted Computing: noun
The act of trusting that any possible attack vector against a computers expected behavior will be done so by those that have nothing better to do than to game the system.
Bye!
I've heard that line before. Weren't the last firmware hacks designed to be "undetectable by Microsoft"?
Old Modded Xbox users?
:(
A cheap Media box was too hard to resist but now no live
Dude. security > hacking. this is just retarded design made product by retarded management.
"I want the head of marketing to design the security model by thursday or chairs will fly."
doing console based software checks to determine validity on the network: priceless.
PS: Bill, fire them all. Get back to work. I'll put coffee on. We'll beat this thing.
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It is _not_ impossible to cheat, you can modify ini files to do it.*
I know that PGR3 and Gears of War being hacked in such a way its quite possible there are many more games.
Now this still may just be an excuse from MS though quite frankly they dont really need one, virtually the only other purpose of a modchip is piracy.
Either way cheating _is_ possible it _has_ been done and banning the modders _will_ stop it regardless of why you really think they have started the bannings.
*There may be other files you can use as well I cant say ive looked in to it much which is why im amazed at how many people claim to be knowledgable about these things yet seem to have missed the fact that there have been super supercars in PGR3 for months.
do this with the hack?
~Vexed and loving it!
They deserve that kind of curses.
tychus
A couple of things:
1) To re-iterate what others are saying, the firmware hack does not defeat executable signatures, so the integrity of game code has not been compromised, however, game data files can be, and have been, compromised (Exo's GoW hacks). The simple solution is to update the executable with hard-coded data file checksums to go along with their weak signature security (in this case, on the GoW data files). So it's not entirely true that the firmware hack doesn't allow cheaters - but Microsoft has other avenues they can pursue in preventing cheaters. This wave of bannings represents an escalation in Microsoft's policy toward modders.
2) Something that many here miss, is that Microsoft has no direct access to the firmware for some models of the DVD drive they are using. Toshiba-Samsung MS28 drives, for example, have "Firmguard" - an attempt to thwart modders that has backfired on Microsoft. Why? Because powercycling the DVD with the correct VIA SATA chipset bypasses Firmguard as part of it's "Bad Flash" recovery mode. Microsoft cannot do this on the 360. This means they cannot read, nor write firmware to these drives.
There were several techniques Microsoft employed against modders in this last wave, verified by special debugging firmware employed - Microsoft was using an anomaly in the firmware's fetch of special sectors to determine if backups were employed (moddded Hitachi drives gave up the goods on this one), as well as more strict checking of those sectors (catching non-"stealth" backups), and finally, using Challenge/Response commands to do threshold timing (many used slower or faster timings on the firmware, which was detectable as being outside of thresholds).
There are still less reliable checks Microsoft may employ, but that dragnet will scoop up some legitmate users, too (No DVD Error code check, used to see who's been using their Xbox 360 as a power supply for the drive as they flashed it). If I was on the team, I'd rule that one out. There are a few other techniques, which I won't mention, since they haven't been discussed publicly, as the others I mentioned have (besides, Microsoft KNOWS how they are checking currently) - which have been identified and "fixed" in the current iXtreme 1.0 firmware.
For what it's worth, many, many 360 modders have NOT been banned. It may be these checks were only performed when they were actively playing a backup on Live... no pattern has emerged, and much of the data is suspect (panicky users, usual liars, etc...).
If Microsoft wants to defeat cheaters, all they need to do is employ a couple of interns to surf the scene sites for hack news, then simply order up special bannin' updates for those hacked games, to detect cheater's data files and ban those specific machines. Future game releases could incorporate some security libraries to make data files more secure (the code currently cannot be hacked).