Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

> There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC.

There's a terrific incentive: Being able to play games without Steam or DRM in a portable format (possibly one file per game). Emulation is beautiful[1] and this time it may come at native speeds considering the Xbox One was x86.

[1] https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route.

There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features:

> https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode:

> https://xboxdevstore.github.io/

This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.

This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.

One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.

>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended.

Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.

There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.

Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.

The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit.

Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before.

So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work.

Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps.

And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.

the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.

Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point.

Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.

No? It is crowbar voltage glitching, but you're significantly underselling it here. The glitching does not affect key comparisons.

It's a double-glitch. The second glitch takes control of PC during a memcpy. The first glitch effectively disables the MMU by skipping initialization (allowing the second glitch to gain shellcode exec). (I am also skipping a lot of details here, the whole talk is worth a watch)

It's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.

This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really exciting exploits coming out here!

The Xbox 360 was hacked in a simpler but nearly identical way [1]! Amazing that despite the various mitigations, the same process was enough to crack the Xbox One.

[1] https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox_360:RGH/RGH3

The earliest example I know of for this is CLKSCREW, but security hardware (like for holding root CA private keys) was hardened against this stuff way before that attack.

Has anyone heard of notable earlier examples?

The presentation notes that this hack currently only works with the first revision of silicon. Later variants have more protections, like some anti-glitching tech that wasn’t quite debugged for the early units being enabled for later runs, and further changes with the security / reset subsystems being split into two separate cores with revised consoles like the the One X. So these would be more of a challenge, even if there’s now an angle of attack to investigate.

> assuming they continue making Xbox

It sounds like that's the plan:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/11/project-helix-buildin...

Xbox One homebrew has effectively always been supported. Anyone can register a development account and boot the system into dev mode. IIRC in a talk about console security, a Microsoft developer noted that this was an intentional deterrent against hacking. An effort to split the community so that pirates and homebrew enthusiasts wouldn't have a reason to collaborate.

Seems unlikely. Someone would have to turn this into a modchip, set up physical distribution networks (all very illegal under the DMCA), and it'd only work on the 2013 machines - Chen's team clearly anticipated this type of attack and were already working on mitigations around the time the Phat released. So as he says at the end, later silicon already has more glitch mitigations built in and has done for a long time. Current gen Xbox isn't even investigated but we can assume it's even harder. They were clearly paying for red teaming. Remember: ZERO software bugs in the boot rom.

Very few exclusives. Couple of Forzas? Halo 5? Practically everything else available elsewhere in similar quality.

I'm just excited at the opportunity to re-purpose my old launch day XBone as some kind of little homelab linux box.

They're pretty common and cheap on the used market, though. I bought mine from a thrifts store for $30, and the console itself regularly goes for ~$50 on eBay.

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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo&t=715s

Depends on the size of the system you need to secure.

If kilobytes of storage and very limited computing power works for your use case, you can get very secure (smartcards and secure elements remain essentially undefeated at the hardware level; all attacks I know happened via weak ciphers).

For an entire current-gen gaming console, you'll have a much harder time.

When your hardware is in the physical custody of the attacker, the threat model changes significantly. Designing a console that takes years for attackers to crack is an impressive feat of engineering.

Thanks for this writeup as I haven't had time to review the video yet :)

So, the only way to manipulate it is to actually screw with the internals of the CPU itself by "glitching", meaning tampering with the power supply to the chip at exactly the right moment to corrupt the state of the internal electronics. Glitching a processor has semi-random effects and you don't control what happens exactly, but sometimes you can get lucky and the CPU will skip instructions. By creating a device that reboots the machine over and over again, glitching each time, you can wait until one of those attempts gets lucky and makes a tiny mistake in the execution process.

Considering that the PSP is a small ARM processor that presumably takes up little die space, would it make sense for it to them employ TMR with three units in lockstep to detect these glitches? I really doubt that power supply tampering would cause the exact same effect in all three processors (especially if there are differences in their power circuitry to make this harder) and any disrepancies would be caught by the system.

> It's mandatory to use the pause key to understand the full details

I was going to say I disagreed but the rest of your comment reminded me that I've accumulated a lot of domain-specific knowledge.

Thank you, sincerely. My main question now is, what degree of repeatability has Markus achieved so far?

Microsoft released a video that covers effectively all of the Xbox One security system, and it's referred to extensively in the talk. The specific methods of glitching don't require any insider knowledge.

Thanks for the mention! I helped with the collateral damage exploit (wrote the PE loader).

I didn't ask but Emma -- who wrote the kernel-mode exploit -- and I would probably agree that Collat is not really what we would consider a proper hack of the console since it didn't compromise HostOS. Neither of us really expected game plaintext to be accessible from SRA mode though.

E-fuses are just write once memory with limited reads ability 10e6-10e7 read cycles after which it becomes unreliable.

Secure boot that can't be controlled by the user should be illegal, though. You should get some secret code along with a device, that allows you as the buyer to tamper with it. So much hardware out there can just serve as something else, or can be supported by people on a voluntary basis, sans the completely arbitrary lockdown of ability to install your own code to the device.

Given that it held up against 13 years of dedicated efforts by people with physical access to the device, many years after its successor was launched, it seems merited in this case.

This talk about some of what went into it is fascinating: https://youtu.be/quLa6kzzra0

In the very strict interpretation probably nothing is unhackable, just not hacked yet. But one should also be pragmatic about what "unhackable" means in context. Without the power of hindsight, a consumer device that stayed unhacked for ~13 years can be reasonably called unhackable during this time.

I wish people would take statements in relative terms along with the whole context before attempting to refute them with a quick gotcha in absolute terms.

Obviously nothing is ever unhackable, not even Fort Knox, given infinite time and resources, and Microsoft never made such claims, this is just media editorializing for clicks and HN eating the bait, but Xbox One was definitely the most unhackable console of its generation. Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack a 499$ consumer device from 2013. PS4 and iPhones of 2013 have also been jailbroken long ago.

Therefore, even the click-bait statement with context in relative terms is 100% correct, it truly was unhackable during the time it was sold and relative to its peers of the time.

I think this might be a good example of the fundamental misunderstanding of what "security" even is. It is never a binary state. Never was. And I think a lot of people don't really grok that and think that if a security block can be overcome in some manner then the thing is not secure.

Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.

i find this statement is often used as an excuse to not think about security at all. which is probably not what you intended here (i hope, although you did say "pointless"...), but some people parrot it for that purpose.

a) this was a security win. millions and millions of people had physical access to the device for over a decade

b) as others have said, security is not all-or-nothing. the xbox one is extremely secure, despite not being perfectly secure.

c) just because something eventually gets hacked does not mean security was pointless. delaying access is a perfectly reasonable security goal. delaying access until the product is retired and the successor is already out on the market is a huge win.

One of the DRM circumvention methods for the Xbox 360 involved precision drilling a specific depth into one of the chips on the board. Microsoft was very aware of the nature of physical access while designing this, haha.

In the talk that the security guy gave, he said it just had to cost more than 10 games for a user to enable piracy

This seems like an unqualified win for the security measure. The future value of Xbox One DRM is probably close to zero. They already got what they wanted out of it.

I can give you a piece of paper with a one time pad encoded secret, where the one time is physically destroyed. You can take all the time you want but you will not crack anything…

Better stop locking your doors, then.

I’m pretty skeptical of that lesson. This took 13 years and it’s cheap mass-market hardware.

'pointless' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This console went completely unhacked for 12 years, with this coming a solid 4 years after the hardware was discontinued. They kept piracy off the console for its whole lifespan, which was the entire point of these security measures. This is a massive success for the Xbox security team.

You do have a credit card, right?