Yeah. I hate Microsoft as a company, and I hate how they inject advertising, inconsistent design, no good centralixed package manager (TBF, they’re fixing that with winget, but only kind of; not sure if there’s a way to add additional repositories), etc.
But they do have damn good security. After the OG Xbox became the legendary homebrew console that it did, Microsoft beefed up security massively with the Xbox 360’s software. What they didn’t do quite as well was beef up hardware security, although the last model of the Xbox 360 (Winchester) has yet to be hacked. The JTAG hack was patched with a firmware update, but then it was found that through a timed glitching attack, you could force memcmp to return true, and if the timing is off, you can reboot the console via glitcher chip or SMC if using RGH 3 and try again.
With the Xbox One, there was a priviledge escillation bug in Dev Mode that to this day has been pretty underutilized, but other than that, it’s been fairly rock solid. There is another point to why, though. Microsoft realised the power of homebrew, especially after Sony made the mistake of removing OtherOS from all PS3 models, and then it got hacked shortly after. So they included (sold you) a way to run UWP apps using a sandboxed environment called Dev Mode. This leaves less of a desire for hackers to attempt exploiting the console’s retail mode, since they have almost the same resources that games have (still weaker, though).
Yeah. I hate Microsoft as a company, and I hate how they inject advertising, inconsistent design, no good centralixed package manager (TBF, they’re fixing that with winget, but only kind of; not sure if there’s a way to add additional repositories), etc.
But they do have damn good security. After the OG Xbox became the legendary homebrew console that it did, Microsoft beefed up security massively with the Xbox 360’s software. What they didn’t do quite as well was beef up hardware security, although the last model of the Xbox 360 (Winchester) has yet to be hacked. The JTAG hack was patched with a firmware update, but then it was found that through a timed glitching attack, you could force memcmp to return true, and if the timing is off, you can reboot the console via glitcher chip or SMC if using RGH 3 and try again.
With the Xbox One, there was a priviledge escillation bug in Dev Mode that to this day has been pretty underutilized, but other than that, it’s been fairly rock solid. There is another point to why, though. Microsoft realised the power of homebrew, especially after Sony made the mistake of removing OtherOS from all PS3 models, and then it got hacked shortly after. So they included (sold you) a way to run UWP apps using a sandboxed environment called Dev Mode. This leaves less of a desire for hackers to attempt exploiting the console’s retail mode, since they have almost the same resources that games have (still weaker, though).