Platform Security Summit
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2019–2026
58:05 · 95K views · Oct 21, 2019
Microsoft's Tony Chen explains how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks, including secure boot, encrypted memory, a security processor and a hypervisor. The goal was to make any hardware attack cost more than the price of many games.
HN points to it constantly in console, DRM and hardware-security threads as the authoritative account of Xbox One's threat model.
20 comments from Hacker News
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. 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 very different approach. Also stuff like Microsoft Pluton are direct descendants of the stuff done for Xbox and Live.
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'. 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.
> 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. 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.
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. this video
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. this video