Hackers Manage To Run Linux On a Nintendo Switch (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday February 10, 2018 @06:48AM from the if-there's-a-will-there's-a-way dept.

Romain Dillet reports via TechCrunch: Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux. The group claims that Nintendo can't fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches. According to fail0verflow, there's a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia's Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip. When your console starts, it reads and executes a piece of code stored in a read-only memory (hence the name ROM). This code contains instructions about the booting process. It means that the boot ROM is stored on the chip when Nvidia manufactures it and it can't be altered in any way after that. Even if Nintendo issues a software update, this software update won't affect the boot ROM. And as the console loads the boot ROM immediately after pressing the power button, there's no way to bypass it. The only way to fix it would be to manufacture new Nvidia Tegra X1 chips. So it's possible that Nintendo asks Nvidia to fix the issue so that new consoles don't have this vulnerability.

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Re:Guess my perspective is different by Anonymous Coward · 2018-02-10 07:54 · Score: 4, Informative

It could also be used to implement a custom bootloader stage that loads the next stage of Nintendo's OS, but ignore a bad signature so that it could have been modified to allow running pirated games. This is every bit as serious as the "sighax" one on 3DS -- a similar unpatchable vuln in the bootrom burned into the CPU -- except that sighax was discovered late in the product cycle.