Hacking Wii U Hacking & Homebrew Discussion

[the_randomizer]

I was around in the Dreamcast days. the console was getting lots of praise on sites and in magazine's.(yes everyone read maggs in those days) all my buddy's including me would order Pirate dreamcast games online. everyone was doing it. it got that bad no one would publish games for the dreamcast anymore. (look it up) But all in all it was the huge security flaw that killed it.

*Sigh* Don't know why I bother trying to keep the topic on track at all.

If that's not what you would like to discuss, then why don't you come up with something else productive about the scene that DOESN'T involve piracy? It is part of the discussion, especially in this scene. There's literally zero ways to keep the topic off piracy so i suggest you stay away if you're going to get flamed up.

Not getting flamed up per se, but I don't want the topic to shut down because of piracy discussions, that's all.

 

[Vappy]

The topic of piracy is still relevent though, in the context that it's the main reason for fail0verflow releasing their work, as marcan said above. And from the looks of things, once a kernel exploit is released, the foundations for piracy will be there with or without their direct involvement. If that does happen, would there still be any reason to keep everything private?

 

[FPSRussi4]

I was around in the Dreamcast days. the console was getting lots of praise on sites and in magazine's.(yes everyone read maggs in those days) all my buddy's including me would order Pirate dreamcast games online. everyone was doing it. it got that bad no one would publish games for the dreamcast anymore. (look it up) But all in all it was the huge security flaw that killed it.

You and your buddies != entire Dreamcast fanbase. I also like how instead of providing proof, you tell us to "look it up", which I did. And I see the same thing you see with any system. You can also buy pirated SNES cartridges and pirated GBA carts that were around when they came out, so nope.

 

[santaclaws429]

*Sigh* Don't know why I bother trying to keep the topic on track at all.

LOL Ok, this is more of a philosophical thing and if anything it should have its own thread instead of flooding this one. (I'm guilty too)

 

[the_randomizer]

The topic of piracy is still relevent though, in the context that it's the main reason for fail0verflow releasing their work, as marcan said above. And from the looks of things, once a kernel exploit is released, the foundations for piracy will be there with or without their direct involvement. If that does happen, would there still be any reason to keep everything private?

I only said what I said as I don't want to have this thread shut down or whatever, a lot of piracy-related threads have gone through that, but, if there's no harm discussing, there's no harm

 

[Bug_Checker_]

The first utopia boot disc came out only like months before the Dreamcast was officially announced to be discontinued.. If you wanna prove that piracy kills anything you'll need a new example!

May I suggest the ZX Spectrum?

Off topic but you are just plain wrong about timeline with dreamcast. Bootrom was dumped almost on day 1 and a modchip was released basically weeks later.

Spoiler

In theory I lose because the Wii U is in enough trouble already without everyone pirating games;

I'd hate to think that I was responsible for making that worse.

Spoiler

But yes, the facts that (1) two years have passed and (2) crediar had already somehow extracted game files and someone else had a kernel exploit, opening multiple avenues to piracy without this key, imply that there is not much harm anymore, and are why I was originally planning to just tweet it, before being (for the nth time) talked out of it, convinced instead to send it privately 'for now'. As I said on Twitter, I am much more annoyed about the way the leak happened than the actual outcome.

Back in the Wii days people keeping things secret drove me up the wall, regardless of their reasons for doing so – that was half my motivation for writing my own stuff in the first place – and that part of me has changed very little; in this situation I was never really happy with secrecy, just at a loss for anything better to do. So I wish everyone the best of luck, and hopefully we all gain from interesting game mods. (I've already posted semi-trollishly here before regarding how much I adore Project M.)

That comment is just being naive. You must know the end result of f0f's work publicly cracking the system wide open (in less than a month after launch) at a hack convention with 30+ people knowing the "secret" that a lot of 3rd party developers said "oh shit here we go again" and bailed on the system in its infancy. That's on you guys. No one would have thought it would have been going on 3 years without additional "major progress".

 

[officialjunk]

If anyone is trying to verify they have the right key against the sha1 hash posted by fail0verflow, you can do it this way:

$echo "0: WIIUCOMMONKEYHEXSTRING" | xxd -r -g0 > wiiucommonkey.bin
$openssl sha1 wiiucommonkey.bin
 
SHA1(wiiucommonkey.bin)= 6a0b87fc98b306ae3366f0e0a88d0b06a2813313

which matches the hash posted by fail0verflow: https://fail0verflow.com/media/30c3-slides/#/25/11

(obviously substitute WIIUCOMMONKEYHEXSTRING with the hex string of the key that you found somewhere online)

 

[santaclaws429]

Am I dreaming, or has the wiiu common key been released?

 

[Bug_Checker_]

Am I dreaming, or has the wiiu common key been released?

ssssshhhhhh go back to sleep. Nintendo Direct is just hours away. Pleasant dreams.

 

[santaclaws429]

Ok, I'm dreaming. night night.

 

[Tothelimit]

That comment is just being naive. You must know the end result of f0f's work publicly cracking the system wide open (in less than a month after launch) at a hack convention with 30+ people knowing the "secret" that a lot of 3rd party developers said "oh shit here we go again" and bailed on the system in its infancy. That's on you guys. No one would have thought it would have been going on 3 years without additional "major progress".

I couldn't agree more with you, but even if it wasn't the main reason, how many games the wiiU has nowadays? ET could possibly count them with his fingers. I think warez stuff wouldn't do any harm to Wii U, partly because it's been dead since its birth, and, given this, I don't think piracy would be as relevant as it was on ps3 compared to homebrew, because it would be just for 10-12 games (and given the games development current rate...), but Wii U homebrew could be unlimited with a new kind of apps, different from what we are used to (taking advantage of the gamepad) and would be much more relevant than warez.

 

[Moraduke]

I have been lurking in this thread for the past few weeks after watching f0f's infamous 2013 Wii U video and have been excited to see new progress on the Wii U eventually becoming homebrew enabled. I would like to take a moment to say how much I personally appreciate all of the work that goes into finding these exploits (past, present, and future) and for a select few doing what seems like mostly a thankless job in their own spare time.

The only thing you can really do that the average user would be interested in is decrypt any of the Wii U ISOs the "scene" has released.

Could you elaborate a bit on "decrypt"? Would this simply allow you to take the contents of an ISO to see how the game is loaded or will this pave the way for playing game backups? Just curious. Thank you again for your work.

 

[uyjulian]

It's pretty much real.

Arrrrr.... I like drama, it feeds my ⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎ arrogance :-)

 

[Kargaroc]

To anyone that wonders what can be done with the key:

Almost all information (game saves, game assets, code, OS files, whatever) stored on the Wii U has been ran through a math algorithm prior to distribution to scramble (encrypt) the information so it doesn't mean anything. To unscramble(decrypt) the information, you need a certain key, stored in all Wii Us, and the common key is it.

Having this key would allow you to see the original information.


As for running games (AKA what CAN'T be done with this key):

The Wii U only runs software that has been encrypted.
Because of the mathematics involved with the encryption, you can't re-encrypt information without ANOTHER key, the private key. No Wii Us have this key, and getting it is practically impossible as only Nintendo themselves actually have it, and the key is too complex (almost scientifically impossible) to guess.

Instead, you try to find ways to run software as is, without any encryption, which is what IOSU and kernel exploits do.

--
TL;DR you can decrypt game assets/code and OS files to see how they work, but you can't re-encrypt anything without another uber-secret key that no-one has, because math.

 

[Twili]

Currently there is only DiscU (which doesn't work) and a semi-complete version with Dolphin from forever ago that doesn't utilize the common key. I've been really lazy in writing a script to do the same thing. I think I'll work on it right now in fact. brb

https://twitter.com/crediar/status/555285927195844608

 

[uyjulian]

Hashes time...
MD5 hash: a243bc56da48bd4eb55c726ecd758d49
SHA1 hash: 6a0b87fc98b306ae3366f0e0a88d0b06a2813313
SHA256 hash: 3b4011e584ae694f59f49df13aa5f471a4230ff7c2c7078361b7d624b8eeaa9b
Info hash: 0f608226046d987df8eb894e366c1b3de967db87

 

[dragonmaster]

in truth those infos if they are used together would lead to wii u hack but i see hackers trying to be on the light site of the force and not doing a thing, i am not a programmer but i happen to understand some basic things and i see lack of enthusiasm ,some even dare say that hacking the wii u is unethicall ,from my stand as i leave in europe just release the way and let us decide what to do ,in my country is legal to mod what you own...

 

[Deletedmember331810]

in opinion those infos if they are used together would lead to wii u hack but i see hackers trying to be on the light site of the force and not doing a thing, i am not a programmer but i happen to understand some basic things and i see lack of enthusiasm ,some even dare say that hacking the wii u is unethicall ,from my stand as i leave in europe just release the way and let us decide what to do ,in my country is legal to mod what you own...

Cool beans, fixed that for you though. Good luck on your Wii U "piracy hack," baha.

 

[dragonmaster]

Cool beans, fixed that for you though. Good luck on your Wii U "piracy hack," baha.

i get the sarcasm ,that is the reason i am on android cause in there there is no demon of piracy .as for piracy get your facts straight no piracy killed any console companies did ,as for the piracy part you think of me at least for a long time i pay for my games but hitting my nerves is attitude like yours ...

 

[OreNPluS]

i didnt got that key thing, so now we can finally hack that console ?