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MayeulC 16 hours ago [-]
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.
monocasa 10 hours ago [-]
For a while, the PRU blocks in the beaglebone's SoC were popular for similar reasons, but those were an order of magnitude more expensive.
mips_avatar 6 hours ago [-]
Do you think that vendors like nvidia will be able to keep their bios proprietary and encrypted? Would be cool if we could enable things like nvlink on consumer cores
skinfaxi 9 hours ago [-]
I recall pre-raspi/arduino there were boards like TI launchpad trying to make things more approachable for hobbyists but raspberry pi was a big step up in that regard.
merpkz 17 hours ago [-]
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
Gigachad 12 hours ago [-]
The most powerful security feature on the Xbox was killing the brand so no one even bothered hacking it. Pretty much all of the games were released on Windows anyway.
They did implement a lot of new security tech but it would have been hacked much much sooner if there was any incentive to do it.
xav_authentique 17 hours ago [-]
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
MayeulC 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Arainach 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cyclopeanutopia 14 hours ago [-]
Do you work at M$?
Arainach 14 hours ago [-]
No, but like most people I matured out of name calling many years ago.
account42 14 hours ago [-]
Your previous comment is evidence to the contrary.
jamesnorden 13 hours ago [-]
Why haven't you?
fwip 9 hours ago [-]
What name did they call them?
goodmythical 9 hours ago [-]
10: Fun fact! Language carries implications. It is possible to say things about people without using the literal direct words that would typically be used to say the same things.
In this instance, the comment "get in line behind slashdot" is being used to imply that the other commenter is something like out of date, unoriginal, or participating in a hivemind. These further imply that the other writer is immature enough to resort to insults, and in their doing so either unintelligent or unmotivated to create their own insult.
Both commenters are engaging in ad hominem and perhaps poisoning the pot, but given that this is not a logical debate the behavior is not so much of a fallacy as just potentially abrassive to certain audiences. The first was abrasive to the second, and the second was abrasive enough to create a comment on hypocrisy.
Then, you asked your question and I said "goto 10"
jamesnorden 9 hours ago [-]
If you can't interpret his post try asking an LLM.
13 hours ago [-]
qs1ykyusPlate 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
9 hours ago [-]
theandrewbailey 13 hours ago [-]
Won't somebody please think of the trillion dollar multinational corporation?
/s (if it wasn't obvious)
Arainach 11 hours ago [-]
Childish tactics discredit the author and both distract from and weaken any other arguments they make. There are plenty of good things to criticize about Microsoft without resorting to playground tactics.
goodmythical 8 hours ago [-]
This isn't a logical forum. We're not here to discredit each others' methodologies as if we are paid to do so.
Commenting on the "childish" behavior of another is to take just as judgemental a stance as to slur a company's name. Both are done in an attempt to sway the readers' opinions beyond what the reader might otherwise have decided on their own. That is, we all already have opinions on terms like microshit/microslop, and we all already have opinions on those who use those terms. Weighing in with yours just publically registers your thumb on the scale.
One could make the opposite point, were one motivated to do so, that because the words we use are important, the use of terms like microslop could convey meaning that the author intended to convey - that they are so displeased as to feel averse to using the companies name. This is a useful construction, and we see it all the time in other useages such as "No, not that one, that (said with animosity) one" or "They who shall not be named" or in taboos such as the F, N, and R words. Choosing to use certain words over others, or certain constructions over others, can and often does carry important information. Here, the writer did not have to write "Oh, I really hate Microsoft, by the way" because we are all capable of inferring that from the single word slur.
We're allowed to have opinions, no? We're allowed to share our opinions with others, surely? And we're allowed to do so in ways that we are comfortable with?
Personally, I draw the line at insulting other humans by inflicting my own judgement upon them, but that's just me sharing my opinion. No real need to run around "correcting" people's tone/style/punctuation/spelling when I do not know what they intended. It's entirely possible that one engaging in something that you see as childish is doing so on purpose - perhaps as commentary on the nature of the situation, or in a way to comically throw ones hands in the air, because that is how they feel comfortable communicating, or simply because that is the range of their communicative ability.
0points 14 hours ago [-]
> Slackdot
What kinda insult is that?
david-gpu 10 hours ago [-]
Tangential history: to this day there's still DNA of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360 inside every Snapdragon GPU (Adreno).
Way back around 2008, AMD was bleeding money after its acquisition of ATI. They wanted to divest of their Handheld division, which was the business unit that was producing chips for smartphones. From what I heard through the grapevine, Qualcomm was interested only in some part of it, particularly the GPU IP, but AMD wanted to sell the whole thing, and eventually lowered the price enough that Qualcomm sealed the deal. I was just a nobody, so take that with a grain of salt.
At the time the purchase was finalized in 2009, the GPU was a miniaturized version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360; all the basic parts were there, but the tile memory (GMem) was colocated with the rest of the GPU instead of being in a separate chip. That's what was marketed as the Adreno 200 GPU. It was a pretty quirky shader architecture where each clock issued two instructions: a SIMD vec4, and a scalar op, in VLIW manner, not superscalar. A lot of the time utilization was poor because the compiler couldn't find a way to pack two useful instructions in that manner. But I digress.
Back to the Qualcomm acquisition. It was a very tense period for the workers. Our salaries at AMD had been frozen for a while, and Qualcomm refused to bump our pay. I wish we, the workers, had built a common front to negotiate, but we didn't. As part of the contract, AMD was not allowed to hire us back, so most of us went along and got swallowed into Qualcomm reluctantly.
Qualcomm had been working on their own GPU design for a number of years, largely through people they had poached from S3 Graphics, IIRC. Anyhow, they had not been able to actually ship their own IP and were still entirely reliant on AMD's GPU designs, so the acquisition made a lot of sense to them. Qualcomm's latest GPU IP was called QShader, and it featured a remarkably sane scalar-based unified architecture; it was a very significant improvement in programmability.
After the acquisition there was a slow process of merging QShader with AMD's Xenos derivative, with the goal of producing a hybrid that would eventually be marketed as Adreno 300. In essence, they took the fixed-function blocks from Xenos, from its command processor to its texture units, while the shading processor was brought in from QShader. That first Adreno 300 (codenamed "Oxili") was a momumental effort from all involved, and while it had some teething problems, it was the foundation for all future Adreno GPUs in Snapdragon chips. And, hey, it even made it to Mars! [0].
Twenty years later and Adreno GPUs still ship with that Xenos-style tile-based rendering architecture. I can't believe that Andy Gruber, the chief architect behind it, doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
Is the market for GPU developers so specialized that engineers get trapped in a company or set of companies? If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set? I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?
I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs? I ask because, my attempts to port software like PS2 demoscene to a very different platform like Mac has led me down very painful path and I now understand that graphics is so custom tailored and built for a specific use case that anything that can lower the bar of difficulty (such as the target having the same GPU design) can only increase the chances of successful ports/decomps.
david-gpu 5 hours ago [-]
> Is the market for GPU developers so specialized that engineers get trapped in a company or set of companies?
To put it bluntly: yes. The upside is that people stick around for a long time, so you get to know your coworkers, and people treat each other nicely.
> If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set?
Definitely. Sometimes people are unhappy with their job but they don't want to move. So they either stick with a job they don't like, or get out of the GPU niche. Nowadays more people work remotely, so there is more mobility than there used to be, but you still have a very short list of places where you realistically want to work at, so people rarely burn any bridges.
> I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?
Yeah, it is a pretty small world. People are usually hired straight out of college, or they are poached from a competitor.
There is a lot of specialized knowledge, so it takes years for people to really be productive. I left AMD/Qualcomm after nine years and I was finally beginning to understand how that GPU worked. I then spent five years at NVidia and left frustrated with how little I had managed to learn about that behemoth. They are immensely complex systems.
> I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs?
Oh, such a good question! Let me think.
I don't know how much of the hardware was exposed in the XBox 360. If it was all standard DirecX, then the underlying hardware won't matter (modulo performance). But if they exposed some of the internal quirks, such as the aforementioned GMem, that could be easier to emulate on hardware of the same family. But only if that new hardware also exposes those hardware features, which is not a given.
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
Fantastic comment, thank you. I knew some of this but not in that detail and some things I thought I knew got corrected. The whole pre-acquisition story of ATI deserves its own chapter too (and indirectly, Tseng Labs).
david-gpu 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I know very little of the acquisition of ATI by AMD. And do take anything I say with a grain of salt, not only because I was a nobody, but also because by brain has turned into swiss cheese after 20 years.
saturn8601 8 hours ago [-]
This talk was linked in a comment that was just flagged for unrelated reasons but I wanted to post this talk in case anyone missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
It is an excellent talk into why the security of the Xbox is so good by the platform security architect himself(at least the software stack). I highly recommend a watch.
qingcharles 18 hours ago [-]
And now we have a working permanent softmod. The Xbox 360 hacking scene is basically complete at this point.
landr0id 16 hours ago [-]
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).
saturn8601 8 hours ago [-]
Do you know if anyone is working on hardware mods? I'm thinking things such as a new GaN based power brick. I've always hated the power brick of the console, why was it so damn large? It drives my efficiency driven mind crazy. They finally got it sorta under control on Barracuda/Winchester boards but still. I wish someone would push forward and make a mini PSU.
ZenoArrow 15 hours ago [-]
> Hacking the console is complete.
No it's not. For starters the recently released softmod does not work on all Xbox 360 revisions.
landr0id 15 hours ago [-]
BadUpdate works on all revisions. It's just not persistent.
With BadAvatar you get interactionless console exploitation that's good enough for most people.
10 hours ago [-]
motownphilly 12 hours ago [-]
With enough time someone will probs figure out way to get it to work
ChrisRR 15 hours ago [-]
As long as rock band blitz isn't removed from the store
landr0id 15 hours ago [-]
The Rock Band Blitz demo was distributed as a roamable package -- i.e. no license that ties it to any particular console (this was intended for e.g. demos distributed on magazine CDs or whatever).
You can just throw it on the filesystem and the console will accept it. I believe it would require a system update to add the executable to a revocation list, which Microsoft is unlikely to do. It's not the only method of achieving initial code execution either.
qingcharles 8 hours ago [-]
Agreed -- I don't think Microsoft care enough at this point to do any more damage control on a 20 year old console.
Pfhortune 6 hours ago [-]
There's now an entry method that just uses a profile/avatar, so that's not even needed. You just boot the console with a USB stick containing the payload, and you're off to the races.
I just started digging into hacking 360s this week, and I'm blown away by how simple it is once you cobble together some files from a few github repos...
hizlikovboy27 16 hours ago [-]
Did you check whether the glicthing setup still has any advantage? for example on consoles the software exploit doesnt cover?
landr0id 15 hours ago [-]
The software exploit works for all console revisions, but the persistent softmod does not.
There exist 3 main things in the software hack space for Xbox 360:
1. BadUpdate (Grimdoomer) which is the only software hypervisor exploit for the Xbox 360. It's intended to be launched from scenarios where someone could achieve code execution. The main method for launching BadUpdate was through Rock Band Blitz (created by ihateccompvir and InvoxiPlayGames). Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.
2. ABadAvatar (shutterbug2000) which uses a memory corruption vulnerability in the avatar loading code in the Xbox dashboard to gain code execution after the dashboard loads, then launches BadUpdate to exploit the console. Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.
3. Peer Pressure (Grimdoomer). First compromises the console through one of the above methods and modifies the SMC firmware to attack the southbridge. The SMC was abused in a similar manner for the JTAG hack, which likely led to Microsoft hardening it in later revisions of the hardware and mitigating the attack used here by Grimdoomer.
At any rate, #1 and #2 do not provide early boot exploitation.
#3 does. The hard drive security sector is involved and the kernel is responsible for loading that, so at this stage you've gone through 2BL, hypervisor, and kernel initialization. So you can't compromise the bootloaders, but you're early enough in the boot chain to do interesting things like replacing the boot animation with something custom.
The JTAG hack does some weird stuff that, truthfully, I've never seen replicated on other hardware. tl;dr the console must be on a vulnerable software version which did not blow a downgrade fuse and using an additional hardware flash chip containing a different version of the OS which had a hypervisor bug, boots the console into that, triggers the exploit using SMC black magic, then reboots back into the upgraded version of the OS.
The RGH hack described in this article would allow you to replace 2BL, so you've compromised the console earlier in the boot chain.
Markoff 17 hours ago [-]
TLDR it requires modchip, can't just use software like with all PS3, so why would anyone bother with xbox when you can play PS games?
> Peer Pressure is a persistent softmod exploit for Xbox 360.
asimovDev 16 hours ago [-]
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
is also very amusing to read
Markoff 14 hours ago [-]
Then I fail to see what's the point of the article and why author omitted this information from it.
einsteinx2 12 hours ago [-]
They didn’t omit that information. This is literally the last paragraph of the article right before the references:
> Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week , rendering my years of effort somewhat moot. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating deep dive into the inner workings of the console and the security mechanisms designed to protect it.
chocochunks 13 hours ago [-]
Because it's about how they modded their 360 and Peer Pressure was only released on the same day this blog post went up.
Markoff 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
einsteinx2 12 hours ago [-]
This is literally the last paragraph of the article right before the references:
> Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week , rendering my years of effort somewhat moot. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating deep dive into the inner workings of the console and the security mechanisms designed to protect it.
kilpikaarna 13 hours ago [-]
I’ll bite: the PS3 controller sux!
wolrah 7 hours ago [-]
> I’ll bite: the PS3 controller sux!
It doesn't suck, but it certainly isn't the best and I've always found the Playstation stans' insistence on it being the greatest possible design to be hilarious because we know exactly how it came to be.
The SNES controller is pretty universally agreed to be great and has more or less defined the standard layout for digital gamepads since then. Given the history between Sony and Microsoft I don't think anyone disputes that the original digital PSX pad is basically a legally-distinct evolution of the SNES pad, made mostly better other than the then-patent-encumbered D-pad. It's a top tier digital input device and allowed for a very easy transition for 2D franchises established on the SNES.
When the N64 however it became immediately clear that 3D gameplay really benefitted from analog inputs, and Sony was caught with their pants down having barely even launched a full size analog joystick at that point. The Dual Analog was quickly put together by slapping two analog sticks on to the standard PSX gamepad in the least disruptive way possible, which was a perfectly fine solution for the time but absolutely not the way to get the best analog controls.
Then they freaking stuck with it instead of designing a controller optimized primarily for 3D play. To this day the Playstation platform has a controller that is derived from one of the best 2D digital gamepads ever to exist but where 3D analog support remains more or less bolted on to the bottom.
Again, it's not terrible, but I find it hilarious how many people insist it's peak controller design overall when it's more of a historical accident.
If I'm playing SNES emulators, I reach for my PS3 gamepad. If I'm playing 3D games, I reach for my Xbox One gamepad. I only ever play 3D games with PS controllers when they're exclusive to PS platforms that aren't yet emulated
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.
They did implement a lot of new security tech but it would have been hacked much much sooner if there was any incentive to do it.
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.
In this instance, the comment "get in line behind slashdot" is being used to imply that the other commenter is something like out of date, unoriginal, or participating in a hivemind. These further imply that the other writer is immature enough to resort to insults, and in their doing so either unintelligent or unmotivated to create their own insult.
Both commenters are engaging in ad hominem and perhaps poisoning the pot, but given that this is not a logical debate the behavior is not so much of a fallacy as just potentially abrassive to certain audiences. The first was abrasive to the second, and the second was abrasive enough to create a comment on hypocrisy.
Then, you asked your question and I said "goto 10"
/s (if it wasn't obvious)
Commenting on the "childish" behavior of another is to take just as judgemental a stance as to slur a company's name. Both are done in an attempt to sway the readers' opinions beyond what the reader might otherwise have decided on their own. That is, we all already have opinions on terms like microshit/microslop, and we all already have opinions on those who use those terms. Weighing in with yours just publically registers your thumb on the scale.
One could make the opposite point, were one motivated to do so, that because the words we use are important, the use of terms like microslop could convey meaning that the author intended to convey - that they are so displeased as to feel averse to using the companies name. This is a useful construction, and we see it all the time in other useages such as "No, not that one, that (said with animosity) one" or "They who shall not be named" or in taboos such as the F, N, and R words. Choosing to use certain words over others, or certain constructions over others, can and often does carry important information. Here, the writer did not have to write "Oh, I really hate Microsoft, by the way" because we are all capable of inferring that from the single word slur.
We're allowed to have opinions, no? We're allowed to share our opinions with others, surely? And we're allowed to do so in ways that we are comfortable with?
Personally, I draw the line at insulting other humans by inflicting my own judgement upon them, but that's just me sharing my opinion. No real need to run around "correcting" people's tone/style/punctuation/spelling when I do not know what they intended. It's entirely possible that one engaging in something that you see as childish is doing so on purpose - perhaps as commentary on the nature of the situation, or in a way to comically throw ones hands in the air, because that is how they feel comfortable communicating, or simply because that is the range of their communicative ability.
What kinda insult is that?
Way back around 2008, AMD was bleeding money after its acquisition of ATI. They wanted to divest of their Handheld division, which was the business unit that was producing chips for smartphones. From what I heard through the grapevine, Qualcomm was interested only in some part of it, particularly the GPU IP, but AMD wanted to sell the whole thing, and eventually lowered the price enough that Qualcomm sealed the deal. I was just a nobody, so take that with a grain of salt.
At the time the purchase was finalized in 2009, the GPU was a miniaturized version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360; all the basic parts were there, but the tile memory (GMem) was colocated with the rest of the GPU instead of being in a separate chip. That's what was marketed as the Adreno 200 GPU. It was a pretty quirky shader architecture where each clock issued two instructions: a SIMD vec4, and a scalar op, in VLIW manner, not superscalar. A lot of the time utilization was poor because the compiler couldn't find a way to pack two useful instructions in that manner. But I digress.
Back to the Qualcomm acquisition. It was a very tense period for the workers. Our salaries at AMD had been frozen for a while, and Qualcomm refused to bump our pay. I wish we, the workers, had built a common front to negotiate, but we didn't. As part of the contract, AMD was not allowed to hire us back, so most of us went along and got swallowed into Qualcomm reluctantly.
Qualcomm had been working on their own GPU design for a number of years, largely through people they had poached from S3 Graphics, IIRC. Anyhow, they had not been able to actually ship their own IP and were still entirely reliant on AMD's GPU designs, so the acquisition made a lot of sense to them. Qualcomm's latest GPU IP was called QShader, and it featured a remarkably sane scalar-based unified architecture; it was a very significant improvement in programmability.
After the acquisition there was a slow process of merging QShader with AMD's Xenos derivative, with the goal of producing a hybrid that would eventually be marketed as Adreno 300. In essence, they took the fixed-function blocks from Xenos, from its command processor to its texture units, while the shading processor was brought in from QShader. That first Adreno 300 (codenamed "Oxili") was a momumental effort from all involved, and while it had some teething problems, it was the foundation for all future Adreno GPUs in Snapdragon chips. And, hey, it even made it to Mars! [0].
Twenty years later and Adreno GPUs still ship with that Xenos-style tile-based rendering architecture. I can't believe that Andy Gruber, the chief architect behind it, doesn't have a Wikipedia page.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter) [1]
Is the market for GPU developers so specialized that engineers get trapped in a company or set of companies? If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set? I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?
I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs? I ask because, my attempts to port software like PS2 demoscene to a very different platform like Mac has led me down very painful path and I now understand that graphics is so custom tailored and built for a specific use case that anything that can lower the bar of difficulty (such as the target having the same GPU design) can only increase the chances of successful ports/decomps.
To put it bluntly: yes. The upside is that people stick around for a long time, so you get to know your coworkers, and people treat each other nicely.
> If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set?
Definitely. Sometimes people are unhappy with their job but they don't want to move. So they either stick with a job they don't like, or get out of the GPU niche. Nowadays more people work remotely, so there is more mobility than there used to be, but you still have a very short list of places where you realistically want to work at, so people rarely burn any bridges.
> I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?
Yeah, it is a pretty small world. People are usually hired straight out of college, or they are poached from a competitor.
There is a lot of specialized knowledge, so it takes years for people to really be productive. I left AMD/Qualcomm after nine years and I was finally beginning to understand how that GPU worked. I then spent five years at NVidia and left frustrated with how little I had managed to learn about that behemoth. They are immensely complex systems.
> I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs?
Oh, such a good question! Let me think.
I don't know how much of the hardware was exposed in the XBox 360. If it was all standard DirecX, then the underlying hardware won't matter (modulo performance). But if they exposed some of the internal quirks, such as the aforementioned GMem, that could be easier to emulate on hardware of the same family. But only if that new hardware also exposes those hardware features, which is not a given.
It is an excellent talk into why the security of the Xbox is so good by the platform security architect himself(at least the software stack). I highly recommend a watch.
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.
You can just throw it on the filesystem and the console will accept it. I believe it would require a system update to add the executable to a revocation list, which Microsoft is unlikely to do. It's not the only method of achieving initial code execution either.
I just started digging into hacking 360s this week, and I'm blown away by how simple it is once you cobble together some files from a few github repos...
There exist 3 main things in the software hack space for Xbox 360:
1. BadUpdate (Grimdoomer) which is the only software hypervisor exploit for the Xbox 360. It's intended to be launched from scenarios where someone could achieve code execution. The main method for launching BadUpdate was through Rock Band Blitz (created by ihateccompvir and InvoxiPlayGames). Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.
2. ABadAvatar (shutterbug2000) which uses a memory corruption vulnerability in the avatar loading code in the Xbox dashboard to gain code execution after the dashboard loads, then launches BadUpdate to exploit the console. Pure software, works across all hardware revisions of the Xbox.
3. Peer Pressure (Grimdoomer). First compromises the console through one of the above methods and modifies the SMC firmware to attack the southbridge. The SMC was abused in a similar manner for the JTAG hack, which likely led to Microsoft hardening it in later revisions of the hardware and mitigating the attack used here by Grimdoomer.
More info on #3 here: https://youtu.be/ftEuor1asBM?t=96
At any rate, #1 and #2 do not provide early boot exploitation.
#3 does. The hard drive security sector is involved and the kernel is responsible for loading that, so at this stage you've gone through 2BL, hypervisor, and kernel initialization. So you can't compromise the bootloaders, but you're early enough in the boot chain to do interesting things like replacing the boot animation with something custom.
The JTAG hack does some weird stuff that, truthfully, I've never seen replicated on other hardware. tl;dr the console must be on a vulnerable software version which did not blow a downgrade fuse and using an additional hardware flash chip containing a different version of the OS which had a hypervisor bug, boots the console into that, triggers the exploit using SMC black magic, then reboots back into the upgraded version of the OS.
The RGH hack described in this article would allow you to replace 2BL, so you've compromised the console earlier in the boot chain.
> 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
> Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week , rendering my years of effort somewhat moot. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating deep dive into the inner workings of the console and the security mechanisms designed to protect it.
> Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week , rendering my years of effort somewhat moot. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating deep dive into the inner workings of the console and the security mechanisms designed to protect it.
It doesn't suck, but it certainly isn't the best and I've always found the Playstation stans' insistence on it being the greatest possible design to be hilarious because we know exactly how it came to be.
The SNES controller is pretty universally agreed to be great and has more or less defined the standard layout for digital gamepads since then. Given the history between Sony and Microsoft I don't think anyone disputes that the original digital PSX pad is basically a legally-distinct evolution of the SNES pad, made mostly better other than the then-patent-encumbered D-pad. It's a top tier digital input device and allowed for a very easy transition for 2D franchises established on the SNES.
When the N64 however it became immediately clear that 3D gameplay really benefitted from analog inputs, and Sony was caught with their pants down having barely even launched a full size analog joystick at that point. The Dual Analog was quickly put together by slapping two analog sticks on to the standard PSX gamepad in the least disruptive way possible, which was a perfectly fine solution for the time but absolutely not the way to get the best analog controls.
Then they freaking stuck with it instead of designing a controller optimized primarily for 3D play. To this day the Playstation platform has a controller that is derived from one of the best 2D digital gamepads ever to exist but where 3D analog support remains more or less bolted on to the bottom.
Again, it's not terrible, but I find it hilarious how many people insist it's peak controller design overall when it's more of a historical accident.
If I'm playing SNES emulators, I reach for my PS3 gamepad. If I'm playing 3D games, I reach for my Xbox One gamepad. I only ever play 3D games with PS controllers when they're exclusive to PS platforms that aren't yet emulated