Hacking Xbox. Reverse Engineering.

http://wormholetravel.net/reverse.html

The XboxTM video game console from Microsoft® is an exciting piece of hardware, and not just because it can play the latest video games. The powerful and cheap Xbox has the potential to be used as a PC, an all-in-one media player, or even a web server. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of books that can teach a reader how to explore and modify modern electronic hardware such as the Xbox. Most electronics textbooks are theory-oriented and very focused, whereas real hacking requires a broad set of practical skills and knowledge. Also, the few practical books on hardware hacking that I had as inspiration as a child have long been outdated by the fast pace of technology. This book is intended to fill the need for a practical guide to understanding and reverse engineering modern computers: a handbook for a new generation of hackers.

The ultimate benefit of hacking the Xbox is its educational value, or as the saying goes, “Given a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime.” Hence, this book focuses on introducing basic hacking techniques — soldering, reverse engineering, debugging — to novice hackers, while providing hardware references and insight that may be useful to more seasoned hackers. The Xbox has served to educate both the security community and the hacking community: not because it is an outstanding example of security, but because it is a high profile, high volume product made by a large company whose focus was recently defined to be security by its chairman.1 The Xbox experience shows that building trustable clients in a hostile user environment is hard, even for a large, well-funded company. One observation is that this risk and difficulty of building cheap, trustable hardware clients places an upper bound on the importance of the secret that can be trusted to such client hardware. In addition, the Xbox provides a consistent teaching example, with almost 10 million nearly identical units out there at the time of writing. The similarity of the Xbox’s architecture to a vanilla PC adds even more educational value to Xbox hacking, since much of the discussion in this book also applies directly to the much broader subject of PCs.

Hardware hackers following the Xbox. The people who hacked the Xbox and the expertise they attained will be relevant long after the Xbox has become a dusty yard sale piece. Hence, there is a conscious social focus to this book. I have included profiles of a sampling of Xbox hacking personalities. The hope is to inspire people, through role models, to pick up a screwdriver and a soldering iron and to start hacking. Instilling this sort of exploratory spirit in the younger generations will be important in the long run for preserving the pool of talented engineers that drove the technology revolution to where it is today. Many of today’s engineers got their start hacking and tinkering with ham radios, telephones and computers which, back in that day, shipped with a complete set of schematics and source code. This pool of engineering talent is essential for maintaining a healthy economy and for maintaining strong national security in the computer age.