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Wii Uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography For Saves
An anonymous reader writes "A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for? From the post: 'It appears a Wii savegame file ends with a certificate chain. The certificates contains a public keypair (the one that is being "certified") and a signature (another number pair) from the signing entity. The number pairs are stored as a compound 60 bit data (first 30 bytes for the first number, and the next 30 bytes for the second). Hence, the first and middle byte is always 00 or 01 for keys, and 00 for signatures. One can check that the keys are indeed NIST B 233 keys using openssls EC_KEY_check_key function (code forthcoming).'"
Why is it that we live in a world where our console gamesaves are protected more aggressively than our bank accounts and our identities combined?
In terms of bricking consoles, Nintendo's a little bit nicer about it. They'll still brick it, but they'll warn you first "hey, if your console is modded, this update's going to brick it, so you might want to abort now".
By the way, with some games refusing to run without updating, this becomes one of those scenarios where if your console is modded, you have to get games illegally to make them work (assuming pirates have found a way to eliminate the code that forces the update).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I happen to have a modded Xbox and a modded Wii
the Xbox has been my media center for about 4 years. I bought it the day it was easily moddable/hackable. It now plays the anime and movies from my server and also plays my dvds along with the games and imports. I really like the option to pay imports. I do speak and understand english, so there really is no reason I should wait 1-2 years for a game. Or movie...
After maybe 2.5 years the dvd reader died and I couldn't read discs anymore. I bought a replacement dvd player for the xbox and installed it myself, voiding my already dead warranty.
Morale of the story :
1 / I used my xbox in a "creative" way, exceeding by much what MS previewed/allowed me to do with it. I had fun with it, and I didn't have to build or buy a pre-made media center.
2 / When it got broken I just had to buy a small, cheap part. not a full xbox, as a "no user servicable parts inside" box concept would have made me.
Episode 2, the WII
Take story from ep.1, make hardware standard pc stuff as in xbox, rinse, repeat.
Guess I, too, am just old fashioned in some ways. I'm too cheap to have every piece of kit I want, so I like to tinker with consoles to give them all the bells and whistles I cannot afford otherwise...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Clearly, the people who make our video games are far more competent than those protecting those other things like votes, money, identity, etc.
Actually, it makes a sort of perverse sense. It's pretty easy to write bog-standard business applications that do CRUD (in both the database & other sense), but it's not so easy to program a game that has to run at acceptable frame rates.