Announcing RocketLauncher! The first exploit with unlocked Arm7!

UPDATE:
Looks like NoCash found an exploit that is even better then RocketLauncher:

https://problemkaputt.de/gba.htm

He titled it Unlaunch. The exploit works by exploiting a flaw in Stage2 and apparently works on all firmware versions. It requires you run the installer from a DSiWare based hax environment as access to SD/NAND is required. (thus you can't run this from Slot-1 based TWL exploit)

The flaw in stage2 is a buffer overflow involving Launcher's TMD file. If you provide a larger then normal TMD file, it will attempt to load the TMD into ram anyways (this occurs before it does the RSA check) This causes it to overwrite some code in arm9 ram causing arm9 to execute the custom payload. The full details are found in the info menus in the installer.

Note however the installer does not appear to work correctly at the moment. I'd advise you not attempt to install it from the installer. Use the manual install method instead. BUT I'd highly recommend you have a hard mod before attempting manual install. If you have had experience modifying your nand you may be ok doing this. But for safety sake I would just advise against that until the installer works properly.

(this is one reason why RL hasn't been released yet. No proper installer tools are available yet and we don't want people bricking consoles trying to install it)

The release of this exploit may impact our plans regarding RocketLauncher. I'll post more about this once StuckPixel has decided to comment on this.


Important Notice:

Do NOT visit Data Management in DSi System Settings or use the 3DS Transfer tool after installing unlaunch. You WILL brick the console. Wait until HiyaCFW is refined/released properly so that SD redirected version of Launcher can be used or when NoCash decides to implement his own version of the SD redirect patch.








Today I can finally announce a new exploit for the Nintendo DSi. I found this flaw back on May 29th. Almost a year after NoCash initially discovered a oversight by Nintendo involving the DS Cart White list which this exploit takes advantage of (Nintendo forgot to reimplement the RSA checks on it lolz). I was fudging with various things in the white list to try and get a crash. I got system menu to crash by using large values in section 3! So I contacted NoCash and a few other devs about this to investigate it and to see if it's exploitable. Well long story short it was!


Summery of the above video:

1. The exploit requires 1.4.0 firmware! Older or newer fw revisions do not work!
2. The exploit requires a flashcart that you are able to modify the internal rom it presents to the system.
3. Details on which cards will be compatible will be revealed at a later time.
4. The exploit involves a buffer overflow flaw involving section 3 of the white list.
5. This overflow occurs on arm7 thus allowing overwriting memory exclusive to arm7.
6. As a result a large enough overflow will hit the IRQ interrupt handler. This is how we gain code execution.
7. Arm9 was relatively easy to take over. Though data caching presented a minor roadblock while testing on hardware. :P
8. I currently use a modified build of nds-bootloader from WinterMute's github. You know, that portion of hbmenu responsible for booting SRLs. :P
9. Because we already gained arm7 we only had to put arm9 in the correct wait state so that nds-bootloader can do it's thing. :D
10. The exploit in theory can work from the menu once it's running. But we currently make use of the auto boot feature to ensure a stable consistant environment. Tests with a second console suggest that is the case. Note that the exception vector for arm7 seems to either be somewhere else once the menu GUI is running or the overflow hits something else causing arm7 to crash early. Currently we plan to only target exploiting the system with an autoboot rom as it's more predictable.
11. The exact machanics of the arm9 take over and how nds-bootloader is loaded may change. Currently the entire payload fits on the cart. But we may allow reading a payload off SD instead.

Credits to NoCash, Gericom, and Normmatt for help testing/figuring this out. Big credit to StuckPixel who put in most of the coding needed to make this happen. My contribution was finding the flaw and help with testing on hardware.


I will release further details as we finalize this exploit and prepare stuff that will make installing it easier.

Note you will either need a nand mod or a DSiWare based exploit to downgrade your console/install the modified white list needed for this to work. Hopefully we'll have a better solution then simply using fwtool to do this so that may be the factor that determines release date so please be patient!

When things are ready I will update this thread!
 
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smf

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the conversation

I thought you meant something important. You don't really understand message boards do you. This thread is 44 pages long and still going, you don't get to end it just because you said something wrong.

Because it would be more rewarding for someone else to make an exploit from the ground up as this one is at a dead end.

Actually it's the opposite, there is no fun in duplicating someones work.
 
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huntertron1

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I thought you meant something important. You don't really understand message boards do you. This thread is 44 pages long and still going, you don't get to end it just because you said something wrong.



Actually it's the opposite, there is no fun in duplicating someones work.
0no my end of the conversation between him/her not the entire board now stop god dang bothering me
 
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Apache Thunder

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Looks like NoCash found an exploit that is even better then RocketLauncher:

https://problemkaputt.de/gba.htm

He titled it Unlaunch. The exploit works by exploiting a flaw in Stage2 and apparently works on all firmware versions. It requires you run the installer from a DSiWare based hax environment as access to SD/NAND is required. (thus you can't run this from Slot-1 based TWL exploit)

The flaw in stage2 is a buffer overflow involving Launcher's TMD file. If you provide a larger then normal TMD file, it will attempt to load the TMD into ram anyways (this occurs before it does the RSA check) This causes it to overwrite some code in arm9 ram causing arm9 to execute the custom payload. The full details are found in the info menus in the installer.

Note however the installer does not appear to work correctly at the moment. I'd advise you not attempt to install it from the installer. Use the manual install method instead. BUT I'd highly recommend you have a hard mod before attempting manual install. If you have had experience modifying your nand you may be ok doing this. But for safety sake I would just advise against that until the installer works properly.

(this is one reason why RL hasn't been released yet. No proper installer tools are available yet and we don't want people bricking consoles trying to install it)

The release of this exploit may impact our plans regarding RocketLauncher. I'll post more about this once StuckPixel has decided to comment on this.
 

Valery0p

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Looks like NoCash found an exploit that is even better then RocketLauncher:

https://problemkaputt.de/gba.htm

He titled it Unlaunch. The exploit works by exploiting a flaw in Stage2 and apparently works on all firmware versions. It requires you run the installer from a DSiWare based hax environment as access to SD/NAND is required. (thus you can't run this from Slot-1 based TWL exploit)

The flaw in stage2 is a buffer overflow involving Launcher's TMD file. If you provide a larger then normal TMD file, it will attempt to load the TMD into ram anyways (this occurs before it does the RSA check) This causes it to overwrite some code in arm9 ram causing arm9 to execute the custom payload. The full details are found in the info menus in the installer.

Note however the installer does not appear to work correctly at the moment. I'd advise you not attempt to install it from the installer. Use the manual install method instead. BUT I'd highly recommend you have a hard mod before attempting manual install. If you have had experience modifying your nand you may be ok doing this. But for safety sake I would just advise against that until the installer works properly.

(this is one reason why RL hasn't been released yet. No proper installer tools are available yet and we don't want people bricking consoles trying to install it)

The release of this exploit may impact our plans regarding RocketLauncher. I'll post more about this once StuckPixel has decided to comment on this.
That is...pretty random :blink:
So, I guess, thanks @nocash123 ? ^_^ happy to see that hackers still care about the DSi! :lol:

One question trough: this is arm7 exploit, right? so, can we make ramdump? O even better, can we fully dump the bootrom finally?

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

I hope that you guys will continue to work on Hiya CFW, as well!
 

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Not sure what CPU the exploit is actually happening on. His exploit seems to take over arm9 first though. I would not be surprised if it's arm7 doing the reading into ram portion of the process much like with RocketLauncher.

EDIT: Also the installer appears to work properly as the boot.nds file for sudokuhax. Any DSiWare exploit that uses generictwlpayload should work with this. However it has been confirmed to NOT work properly from anything using minitwlpayload. So ugopwn and 4swordshax can't boot this installer properly. (it will hang when you attempt to run install) As mentioned before this installer also didn't work when booted directly via RocketLauncher. (but that's not important here since RL is not public yet anyways)
 
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myanpezi

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Not sure what CPU the exploit is actually happening on. His exploit seems to take over arm9 first though. I would not be surprised if it's arm7 doing the reading into ram portion of the process much like with RocketLauncher.

EDIT: Also the installer appears to work properly as the boot.nds file for sudokuhax. Any DSiWare exploit that uses generictwlpayload should work with this. However it has been confirmed to NOT work properly from anything using minitwlpayload. So ugopwn and 4swordshax can't boot this installer properly. (it will hang when you attempt to run install) As mentioned before this installer also didn't work when booted directly via RocketLauncher. (but that's not important here since RL is not public yet anyways)
not sure why but seems like fieldrunnerhax doesnt like it as boot.nds having to use hbmenu for it.
 

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I would certainly hope @nocash123 open sources this soon. Some of the patches I don't like. Like the unlocked SCFG in NTR mode patch. That causes problems with a few NTR games and old homebrew. I know this because a couple years back we had patched dev launcher SRL for TWL_FIRM on 3DS that would run with SCFG unlocked in NTR mode for any NTR mode game booted with it. A few retail games wouldn't work properly and older DS homebrew would misdetect that they were TWL enhanced mode and attempt to do DSi specific stuff with touchscreen/display/sound and wouldn't work properly. (also it's impossible to switch back into TWL mode once the NTR mode bit is set in SCFG so you can't run something before hand to change things back once NTR mode is flipped)

We figured out how to mode switch into NTR mode properly (aka NTR Launcher to name one example) so we didn't have to modify TWL_FIRM's dev launcher SRL anymore)

I'd also like to run SD redirected launcher. For now HiyaCFW should work from this but the way NoCash patches things doesn't require prepatched binaires so hopefully we can do sd redirection via his code instead. :P
 
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I would certainly hope @nocash123 open sources this soon. Some of the patches I don't like. Like the unlocked SCFG in NTR mode patch. That causes problems with a few NTR games and old homebrew. I know this because a couple years back we had patched dev launcher SRL for TWL_FIRM on 3DS that would run with SCFG unlocked in NTR mode for any NTR mode game booted with it. A few retail games wouldn't work properly and older DS homebrew would misdetect that they were TWL enhanced mode and attempt to do DSi specific stuff with touchscreen/display/sound and wouldn't work properly. (also it's impossible to switch back into TWL mode once the NTR mode bit is set in SCFG so you can't run something before hand to change things back once NTR mode is flipped)

We figured out how to mode switch into NTR mode properly (aka NTR Launcher to name one example) so we didn't have to modify TWL_FIRM's dev launcher SRL anymore)

I'd also like to run SD redirected launcher. For now HiyaCFW should work from this but the way NoCash patches things doesn't require prepatched binaires so hopefully we can do sd redirection via his code instead. :P
I hope so that he does open source this but (I think he rarely open sources his stuff soo)
 

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Important Notice:

Do NOT visit Data Management in DSi System Settings or use the 3DS Transfer tool after installing unlaunch. You WILL brick the console. Wait until HiyaCFW is refined/released properly so that SD redirected version of Launcher can be used or when NoCash decides to implement his own version of the SD redirect patch.
 
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dpad_5678

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Important Notice:

Do NOT visit Data Management in DSi System Settings or use the 3DS Transfer tool after installing unlaunch. You WILL brick the console. Wait until HiyaCFW is refined/released properly so that SD redirected version of Launcher can be used or when NoCash decides to implement his own version of the SD redirect patch.
Yeah, I'm definitely waiting. Thanks for your hard work, though! :grog:
 

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It seems like v0.6 is supposed to fix the data management problem. Does this mean it's relatively safe? (At least from that issue.)
 

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