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

Posted by BeauHD on 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.

3 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Uhhh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suspect this ROM will be deeply embedded as part of the IC and will be impossible to reprogram; it isnâ(TM)t an eprom itâ(TM)s part of the Silicon.

  2. Re:Guess my perspective is different by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And is this a vulnerability to the Nintendo software and games? To me it looks like it's just a re-purposing of the hardware.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. You can run Linux on it, because of vulnerability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is not something to celebrate.

    In the old days, when people said "Hackers got Linux running on a toaster", it meant that some clever people spent some time figuring out how to write hardware-specific Linux components for the toaster; it meant that Linux was improving, and growing.

    Today, when people say it, they mean that some shady group of people used some shady techniques to exploit a bug in the toaster, and if you want to do the same on your toaster, then you'll probably have to download from some shady website a shady black-box binary blob that will run the exploit for you, without you ever really knowing just WTF is going on; it means that personal computing is further collapsing.