Weired Warez: Hacking the Xbox

An Introduction To Reverse Engineering

286 Pages | No Starch Press, Inc | PDF

The Xbox video game console from M!cro$oft 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 ofpractical 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 Also, the few practical books on hardware hacking that I had as inspiration as a child have long been outdated by the fast pace of technology.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 engineeringmodem computers: a handbook for a new generation ofhackers.

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.

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