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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?
Not necessarily true. Hacking can get you a long way, but eventually it usually breaks down.
Case Study: A game I was part of the dev team for held an online, sponsored tournament. The four finalists were flown to Hawaii where they competed head to head on rigs provided by the company for the championship. One of the final four had been playing phenominally online, yet once he got to Hawaii, his game fell completely apart. He complained endlessly about how the computer he was playing on was different from what he was used to at home. Yet the other three players didn't complain at all. This guy got completely, embarassingly destroyed in the finals. And we eventually patched the hole he'd used to cheat his way to the finals.
But don't miss the fact that only 1 out of the 4 finalists was a cheater (I believe first place won $50,000 with a shot at a million-dollar challenge). The other three were simply legitimately good players.
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...
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!
Remember that Microsoft sells 360s at a loss, making up that loss with game sales and live accounts. If someone buys a new 360 and only plays pirated games on it, Microsoft would only make money from the live subscription. Thus it's still bad for Microsoft.
PS3 - free online, dedicated servers, 32, 40 player games
I assume that this will remain a theoretical maximum until such time as the 32nd PS3 is actually sold?
Huh weird my GoW multiplayer perfect...my Cod3 (24 people) no issues...so either your connection sucks or you are talking out your ass.
So the cheater didn't win, but he still got a free trip to Hawaii. Sounds to me like he did pretty well.
"Not necessarily true. Hacking can get you a long way, but eventually it usually breaks down."
Only for those who are later required to play on somebody else's hardware.
"But don't miss the fact that only 1 out of the 4 finalists was a cheater"
Oh, I don't miss it, I just wouldn't use the adjective "only." It suggests that at least 1/4 of the players in your game were cheaters, potentially as many as 100%-3. It also suggests that your security was so slipshod that you allowed a cheater to get so far as the finals, knocking out unknowable numbers of honest players in the process (potentially one that was better than the other three you had present). It sounds like this guy would have won if he simply had the foresight to sneak in a USB key drive. In fact, are you sure one of the other three didn't do just that?
I wouldn't be touting this as an accomplishment, rather this is a failure. This isn't a story of "Cheaters never win," but only "Don't get caught."
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).