Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft

youtube-dl -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a] -o "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4" this video start "" "XBox One Story by Tony Chen.mp4"

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: 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).

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] this video

This effectively already exists. The Xbox One SOC apparently monitors its own voltage and shuts down / doesn't function if it falls out of spec [1] as part of a totally OTT suite of anti-engineer techniques. As an aside, I hate all of this. If someone made an open console, I'd buy it in a second. I realise that's probably my computer running linux next to me, but still... [1] this video

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: this video

This is the same attack (and same people who developed) faulTPM[1] that was previously discussed[2]. This article is the same people demonstrating that attack against Tesla vehicles. The paper[1] and previous discussion[2] 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-waste[3], Tesla likely can't do much about this attack because Tesla (not users) would be responsible for a very expensive change of vehicle hardware. If it's not an easy-to-execute attack like faulTPM, there are more complex (but becoming more mainstream and cheaper) IC reverse engineering methods like polishing the die down to take photos of each metal layer and regenerating VHDL, FIB editing an operational IC to bypass tamper detection methods, etc[4]. A security architect of the Xbox One presented a talk[5] a few years ago which provides some good background too. Largely the Xbox One has managed to avoid piracy because they made it economically not worth anyone's time to attack due to competitive pricing models versus high cost of attack. Similar to use of Denuvo for a month or two after release of a PC game, attackers aren't going to bother if their work amounts to nothing a month later. Hacking a Tesla to enable additional fe

Is it not true? Not everything needs to be secure, just the right parts. The test is whether you can jailbreak the devices and not be detected by their RA scheme. As far as I know, there's no (public) way to do this. BTW, this tech isn't new. In practice if you are vertically integrating, it's possible to make things secure enough. Games consoles have 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: 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 criteria and Apple is definitely one of them.

no, that is the whole point of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization hypervisor (and remember, bare-metal is just another guest). Guests should not be able to jump to hypervisor control just because they type sudo, or just because they have physical presence. this all comes from the work AMD did on the xbox hypervisor, and obviously a console needs to be physically present (sitting in the attacker's living room) and survive a complete compromise of a guest partition (again, potentially including the OS/"bare-metal guest"). this video why would ring0 ever be intended to grant you access to ring -1 or -2? why even have rings -1 or -2 in that situation?

I think you might be mixing up the Xbox 360 with the Xbox One, the former was ultimately compromised in several ways, but the latter's security has held up extremely well for 11 years and counting. The Xbox One and its successor are easily the most secure consoles ever made. Obligatory: this video

This fearmongering about Microsoft has existed since the very day the first TPM shipped, and it has never come closer to being real. Most of the security improvements shipping in Windows are leftovers from Xbox, but they very clearly state that Windows Security does not treat the user themselves as a threat. See the slide around 4 minutes into this talk: this video

Tony Chen from Microsoft gave a talk called "Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story" and he explains that they want any sort of physical attack to cost at least the price of 10 games ($600 at the time). this video

The Xbox does not use AMD's Platform Security Processor, they have their own custom security chip with Microsoft hardware and their own custom BootROM. This custom security processor actually has its own bit of RAM entirely in the die and doesn't even go out to the DRAM at all. See the slide on Tony Chen's presentation about Xbox One security this video and this video from the person who hacked the Xbox One link