"Hacking The Xbox" and related materials.

[Deathscreton]

As the title states, I want to learn more about reverse engineering and it's affiliated subjects. I've been reading the aforementioned book "Hacking The Xbox", but I'm wondering if there's any other literature or guides that people really enjoy or that may serve as an entry point to this.

I don't have any formal experience or teachings regarding this field, but I do have some personal experience in C++, Java, and C#, though I'd hardly call myself proficient. In any case, give me some suggestions!

 

[tech3475]

Not the most in depth, but I find watching the old presentations on console hacks on youtube very interesting.

 

[Deathscreton]

Not the most in depth, but I find watching the old presentations on console hacks on youtube very interesting.

Overall general information is never bad. Are you referring to the c4 talks and such?

 

[FAST6191]

I can't speak for tech3475 but I would say yes.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ChRiStIaAn008 has a bunch of older stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2TXq_t06Hjdr2g_KdKpHQg for the newer C3s.

Defcon, blackhat ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6q9Ie29ajGqKApbLqfBOg ) and a whole bunch of other conferences (the first link names a whole bunch) and more will have good things.

Many speakers will do different cons on different years.

In regular computers "hacking is just administration" for the most part -- I can usually follow along with all the crazy maths you see in the talks like those on the channels above but you don't go there first, you check the default passwords first (and all the other services that may have been left open on a stock install -- all the "404 running blah on version bleh" is wonderful for that).
Something similar applies to the electronics side of things in that if you know how things are designed (especially for volume production) you can narrow down what you are looking at quickly enough -- no sense spending ages tracing out what some headers on what you find out is a power supply board/section that amounts to "give me a clean DC voltage" to the part of the thing you actually want to hack.

I do and don't envy people starting today. On the one hand you can have exceptionally nice tools at hobbyist money, on the other designers have woke up and started securing things somewhat better, and obviously soldering is far harder than the through hole era. That said if you want to use your exceptionally nice hobbyist priced tools and hack older devices like only someone in a multi million dollar lab would have been able to 15 years ago then go for it. Following on from the last sentence there is also something in computers -- if I had had the skills in 1999 I am sure I would have loved a copy of virtualbox and a machine that could do it justice.

An older thread I made, most things in that are still current though and likely will be for the next while (about the only thing that changed is we started to see some mitigations for some hack methods).
https://gbatemp.net/threads/some-hacking-concepts-and-links.287721/

If you are liking the xbox
https://web.archive.org/web/2010061...es_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System

More altering games than hacking devices/programs/security but https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ might also be of some passing interest.

 

[Deathscreton]

I can't speak for tech3475 but I would say yes.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ChRiStIaAn008 has a bunch of older stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2TXq_t06Hjdr2g_KdKpHQg for the newer C3s.

Defcon, blackhat ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6q9Ie29ajGqKApbLqfBOg ) and a whole bunch of other conferences (the first link names a whole bunch) and more will have good things.

Many speakers will do different cons on different years.

In regular computers "hacking is just administration" for the most part -- I can usually follow along with all the crazy maths you see in the talks like those on the channels above but you don't go there first, you check the default passwords first (and all the other services that may have been left open on a stock install -- all the "404 running blah on version bleh" is wonderful for that).
Something similar applies to the electronics side of things in that if you know how things are designed (especially for volume production) you can narrow down what you are looking at quickly enough -- no sense spending ages tracing out what some headers on what you find out is a power supply board/section that amounts to "give me a clean DC voltage" to the part of the thing you actually want to hack.

I do and don't envy people starting today. On the one hand you can have exceptionally nice tools at hobbyist money, on the other designers have woke up and started securing things somewhat better, and obviously soldering is far harder than the through hole era. That said if you want to use your exceptionally nice hobbyist priced tools and hack older devices like only someone in a multi million dollar lab would have been able to 15 years ago then go for it. Following on from the last sentence there is also something in computers -- if I had had the skills in 1999 I am sure I would have loved a copy of virtualbox and a machine that could do it justice.

An older thread I made, most things in that are still current though and likely will be for the next while (about the only thing that changed is we started to see some mitigations for some hack methods).
https://gbatemp.net/threads/some-hacking-concepts-and-links.287721/

If you are liking the xbox
https://web.archive.org/web/2010061...es_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System

More altering games than hacking devices/programs/security but https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ might also be of some passing interest.

That is a fuckton of information. You really pulled out the stops on this one. I'd like this post more than once if I could. Thank you so much! I'm gonna give all of this a read over during the week. I have a lot of free time at work. >.>