u/kerberosmansourin r/netsec • Recommends
Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft
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#xboxone#secureboot#hypervisor
Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft
Platform Security Summit
1.1K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 9 people: 8 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2026.
- Presented by Tony Chen, Microsoft Platform Security Engineer
Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.
95K views7 years ago9 recommendations
SecurityHardwareExploits and vulnerabilitiesCPUs and computer architectureEmbedded systems
Tony Chen explains the hardware and software security architecture of the Xbox One, detailing how it resists physical attacks and piracy.
PlatformSecuritySummit.com/2019/speaker/chen Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. We will first describe the Xbox security design goals and why it needs to guard against hardware attacks, followed by descriptions of the hardware and software architecture to keep the Xbox secure. This includes details about the custom SoC we built with AMD and how we addressed the fact that all data read from flash, the hard drive, and even DRAM cannot be trusted. We will also discuss the corresponding software changes we made to keep the system and the games secure.Why it's here
9 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended by engineers as a masterclass in hardware security design and building systems that trust nothing off-die.
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Here is an excellent talk about the Xbox One security (and Series X|S should be quite similar) by the person who is in charge of security on the Xbox platform. link to this video Basically it boils down to trust NOTHING outside the actual SoC chip (so stuff like RAM, Flash/HDD, optical dics, etc cannot be trusted). The SoC is made on 28nm (Series X|S 7nm) process so physically attacking it is very hard/expensive. Also goes into the difference between Windows (PC) and Xbox (Console) security. On PC the owner/admin wants the help keep the system secure as it gets attacked by malicious parties from the internet. On console the owner is usually the bad guy (the one doing the attacking) and thus needs a ver…
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DRM has only been successful in the space of making easily replicable attacks more expensive than what is being protected by the DRM. Microsoft has talked about this publicly in this great talk on the Xbox One's physical device security. 'We can't stop people hacking, but we can make each hack more expensive than what someone would spend on games on average'. link to this video SGX running on centralized servers turns that calculus on it's head by concentrating the benefits of the hack all in one place.
nemothekidon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)”
There's a really good presentation, by a Microsoft Platform Security Engineer, detailing the lengths they went through to ensure only properly signed executables run on the Xbox One and really answers your question. One of the tools they developed, HVCI, was later incorporated into Windows Hyper-V. link to this video
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Obligatory link to the talk from MS where they covered the origins of Pluton on the Xbox: link to this video The video does a good job of the original threat model for this technology and how it works on Xbox.
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> would like to know how the answer is no TL;DR: cryptography and secure hardware (think TPM) This is a very interesting talk from Microsoft about how they made Xbox immune to physical attacks (modding) like you proposed. Now they are working on getting this tech into regular computers. link to this video Of course, we don't know if the solution Mercedes used is as robust. For all we know it can be hacked in 1 minute.
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This talk1 was interesting watch wrt that. They made DRAM encrypted and Secure Boot seems to be done right too… 1: link to this video
mmaniacon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch”
Modchips on newer Switches use fault injections (clock/voltage glitching) but there exist mitigations for those. The Xbox One is confirmed to use them. I encourage you to watch this video where Microsoft describes the security design of the Xbox One, which so far has been almost bulletproof. link to this video
ytchon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Breaking the console: a brief history of video game security”
Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft: link to this video I like this video too, Tony Chen explains the overview of Xbox security system.
anonymfuson Hacker News • Mentions
On “Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story [video]”
youtube-dl -f bestvideoext=mp4+bestaudioext=m4a -o "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4" link to this video start "" "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4"
judge2020on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Yuzu (Nintendo Switch Emulator) Progress Report January 2021”
People said the Xbox one was just a Windows PC with a proprietary UI as well, but you really have to understand what went into making it before you determine if that’s true: link to this video But yes, if you could break the security and implement the (many) private APIs, you wouldn’t necessarily need to emulate (although it might be legally and technologically easier to emulate a ps5 than re-implement everything).
novokon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck”
The point of crypto locked controllers made by and for the manufacturer's console is that tampering will cause the device to refuse to run. Which leaves you at a robot to physically manipulate the device as I said. Since it doesn't have to be an standard like HDCP, this can be locked down pretty well like the xbox one is. 0 At that point the barrier to entry would be so annoying that online cheating will be reduced significantly, and pro tournaments will be done in person to let you prevent usage of robots. Also everyone will be using the same equipment probably provided by tournament organizers. 0 link to this video
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floatbothon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC”
A cheaply made smartcard chip should be much easier to breach than the main SoC. Both because it's way simpler, older process silicon… and much more importantly because you have an external bus going to it. Now that the big consoles use semi-custom SoCs, their NUMBER ONE principle is to not trust anything that's off the main silicon die. See the Xbox security talk: link to this video
dhxon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features”
This is the same attack (and same people who developed) faulTPM1 that was previously discussed2. This article is the same people demonstrating that attack against Tesla vehicles. The paper1 and previous discussion2 address the underlying problems with AMD's Secure Processor (AMD-SP) that is embedded in their CPU SoCs and previously and more commonly known as Platform Security Processor (AMD-PSP). Unlike a web browser where W3C AntiFraudCG folk propose that websites would blacklist all impacted AMD-SP hardware and create massive amounts of e-waste3, Tesla likely can't do much about this attack because Tesla (not users) would be responsible for a very expensive change of vehicle hard…
mike_hearnon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Analysis of Obfuscation Techniques Found in Apple FairPlay”
…e been doing this for years. Even in the Xbox 360 era, the use of local exploits was detectable the moment you connected to Xbox Live, and AFAIK Xbox One remains completely unmoddable/unjailbroken even after a decade into its lifespan. There's a tech talk here by a member of the Xbox team who talk about how they secured it against physical attack: link to this video But bear in mind, RA was never the weak point even of the 360. Making remote attestation secure is a well studied problem in the industry. It's been done several times. You have to be a competent tech firm producing your own hardware/software combos, and you need a competent security team, but there are several companies that meet that crit…