Homebrew So whats the deal with 3ds encryption?

[Phanalax]

Just bought a 3ds, It's shipping out to me soon. So as I am interested in trying my hand at making homebrew for it, I want to know what the deal is with the 3ds' encryption? From what I can gather its per-console AES of some sort, with only signed code being allowed to run. This makes me think there must be some kind of master key. The thing is I'm just shooting in the dark because information on the encryption is hard to come by. So If its not too much to ask, could some wonderful knowledgeable person here impart some information to me? Preferably if anybody knows the cipher(s) for it I would love to try my hand at picking them apart. (Even if it is AES). Thanks in advance.

 

[shinyquagsire23]

Basically the 3DS uses a crapton of encryption everywhere, between ROM specific keys, console specific keys, current firmware seeds unique to each firmware on setup, and a lot of other crap. Right now it uses hardware decryption so picking it apart is almost impossible. If you've ever looked at an xorpad, it's literally just random data, no patterns at all. I'm not sure if there's a master key per-se, but if there is it's stowed away safely in the inaccessible part of the bootloader (plus there's still the issue of it being a hardware encryption).

 

[WulfyStylez]

Just bought a 3ds, It's shipping out to me soon. So as I am interested in trying my hand at making homebrew for it, I want to know what the deal is with the 3ds' encryption? From what I can gather its per-console AES of some sort, with only signed code being allowed to run. This makes me think there must be some kind of master key. The thing is I'm just shooting in the dark because information on the encryption is hard to come by. So If its not too much to ask, could some wonderful knowledgeable person here impart some information to me? Preferably if anybody knows the cipher(s) for it I would love to try my hand at picking them apart. (Even if it is AES). Thanks in advance.

http://3dbrew.org/wiki/AES
Encryption is always AES, probably due to US export law. Signing is done with RSA-2048 over a SHA-256 hash most of the time.
The hardware AES engine is reeeally secure. The few keys we've retrieved from keyslots have been from either luck, or quite a lot of work.

 

[Tjessx]

I'm wondering for a very long time, if the 3DS system is encrypted by a unique id, doesn't the key has to be stored in some kind of bios in order to make it boot?

 

[yifan_lu]

Ugh such blatant ignorance of how crypto works makes me want to cry. Why can't people do the minimum work and research a topic for 5 minutes before making a post on the Internet...

 

[WulfyStylez]

Everyone generally needs to take a good long read over at 3DBrew.