This blogpost makes the point that the advent of the Raspberry Pi microcontroller made it easier to interface with a variety of hardware.
And it is true, but the capability was already quite cheap in 2017 and before: fx2 chips can do quite a lot, for instance.
I hope Bunnie's Baochip BIO approach will take off in microcontrollers, making that sort of feature more ubiquitous. You can do a lot of things with an ESP32 for instance, but the RP2040 still has an edge for I/O.
Also missed the opportunity to mention that the RP2350 itself had its protection defeated by fault injection.
Lastly, side channels and fault injection attacks are highly viable for mid-2010 and earlier hardware, but chip designs are hardening against them, for instance forcing a reboot when a glitch is detected. This makes current and next-generation chips harder to attack (see the laser fault injection on RP2350, though this is also being hardened against). It's probably a good thing to some extent (make it harder to duplicate my credit card), but I mourn the loss of control over my own HW.
Incidentally, tinkering with the first gen Xbox (which is the security equivalent of a swiss cheese) taught me a lot about software, networking and electronics when I was younger. I hope that future generations will still get to tinker like that.
What did Microslop change in Xbox One that prevented it from being exploited much in the same way? Afaik Xbone is still undefeated in terms of security, either because it's so good or because it's just uninteresting console to own
It has been defeated, but through hardware attacks (voltage glitching mostly). The author did an very interesting presentation about the process at reverseconf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTFn4UZsA5U&t
They allowed people to run their own homebrew, and allowed more third party apps like Kodi (formerly known as XBMC -- XBox Media Center, that grew out of XBMP) on their store.
Homebrew software had been a driving force behind consoles being hacked in the past. The console is obviously more secure, but they also removed some incentives.
I was in the Xbox 360 scene back in the day before JTAG hacks existed -- modding savegames, getting a devkit, and building my own private homebrew. For the most part I left the scene around 2013.
The softmod had me seeing what the status quo is and things are... not great.
17 years since the JTAG hack and just as of a couple days ago someone finally vibecoded a non-proprietary SDK. The scene by and large to the masses (or at least, the loudest group) mostly associates homebrew with "stealth" servers aka servers your console connects to which assist in bypassing Xbox LIVE challenges that detect modified consoles. The servers provide mod menus (trainers, basically) for various games and the ability to use older dashboards.
The kicker is the custom servers are not required, code for bypassing challenges leaked ages ago, and people still pay for stealth server access! I can't even imagine who is still playing Xbox 360 titles on Xbox LIVE except people with modded consoles at this point.
Hacking the console is complete. But the state of the scene is a bit sad.
At least now we can vibecode the missing bits of the ecosystem (I say this as I'm literally reverse engineering and reimplementing the devkit debug monitor).
Still mind-boggling that it took almost 20 years for it to come out
>You can try to use the exploit with a SSD if you choose, however, for optimal boot times and reliability it's recommended to use a mechanical HDD instead
And it is true, but the capability was already quite cheap in 2017 and before: fx2 chips can do quite a lot, for instance.
I hope Bunnie's Baochip BIO approach will take off in microcontrollers, making that sort of feature more ubiquitous. You can do a lot of things with an ESP32 for instance, but the RP2040 still has an edge for I/O.
Also missed the opportunity to mention that the RP2350 itself had its protection defeated by fault injection.
Lastly, side channels and fault injection attacks are highly viable for mid-2010 and earlier hardware, but chip designs are hardening against them, for instance forcing a reboot when a glitch is detected. This makes current and next-generation chips harder to attack (see the laser fault injection on RP2350, though this is also being hardened against). It's probably a good thing to some extent (make it harder to duplicate my credit card), but I mourn the loss of control over my own HW.
Incidentally, tinkering with the first gen Xbox (which is the security equivalent of a swiss cheese) taught me a lot about software, networking and electronics when I was younger. I hope that future generations will still get to tinker like that.
Homebrew software had been a driving force behind consoles being hacked in the past. The console is obviously more secure, but they also removed some incentives.
Microsoft Security gave an excellent presentation on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLa6kzzra0
The softmod had me seeing what the status quo is and things are... not great.
17 years since the JTAG hack and just as of a couple days ago someone finally vibecoded a non-proprietary SDK. The scene by and large to the masses (or at least, the loudest group) mostly associates homebrew with "stealth" servers aka servers your console connects to which assist in bypassing Xbox LIVE challenges that detect modified consoles. The servers provide mod menus (trainers, basically) for various games and the ability to use older dashboards.
The kicker is the custom servers are not required, code for bypassing challenges leaked ages ago, and people still pay for stealth server access! I can't even imagine who is still playing Xbox 360 titles on Xbox LIVE except people with modded consoles at this point.
Hacking the console is complete. But the state of the scene is a bit sad.
At least now we can vibecode the missing bits of the ecosystem (I say this as I'm literally reverse engineering and reimplementing the devkit debug monitor).
No it's not. For starters the recently released softmod does not work on all Xbox 360 revisions.
With BadAvatar you get interactionless console exploitation that's good enough for most people.
> Peer Pressure is a persistent softmod exploit for Xbox 360.
>You can try to use the exploit with a SSD if you choose, however, for optimal boot times and reliability it's recommended to use a mechanical HDD instead
is also very amusing to read