A £5 Raspberry Pi Pico Finally Cracked My Xbox 360 After Nine Years
It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360
In 2017, modchipping an Xbox 360 demanded a glitcher chip, a NAND programmer, and a JTAG programmer — the author's homemade printer-port dumper never worked, and the project was shelved. Returning in 2026 with a Raspberry Pi Pico, the whole job took seconds. Fault injection works by toggling CPU_RESET so the processor misreads a single mr instruction during signature verification, granting arbitrary code execution. A software-only exploit landed just last week, making the effort moot.
So if the door to the castle is locked, and the guards, who are wise to equine ploys, are checking ID at the door, how does one get in? Well you don't use a key. You inform the guard that his shoelaces are untied and hit him over the head with a club.
- MayeulC
This blogpost makes the point that the advent of the Raspberry Pi microcontroller made it easier to interface with a variety of hardware.
And it is true, but the capability was already quite cheap in 2017 and before: fx2 chips can do quite a lot, for instance.
I hope Bunnie's Baochip BIO approach will take off in microcontrollers, making that sort of feature more ubiquitous. You can do a lot of things with an ESP32 for instance, but the RP2040 still has an edge for I/O.
Also missed the opportunity to mention that the RP2350 itself had its protection defeated by fault injection.
Lastly, side channels and fault injection attacks are highly viable for mid-2010 and earlier hardware, but chip designs are hardening against them, for instance forcing a reboot when a glitch is detected. This makes current and next-generation chips harder to attack (see the laser fault injection on RP2350, though this is also being hardened against). It's probably a good thing to some extent (make it harder to duplicate my credit card), but I mourn the loss of control over my own HW.
Incidentally, tinkering with the first gen Xbox (which is the security equivalent of a swiss cheese) taught me a lot about software, networking and electronics when I was younger. I hope that future generations will still get to tinker like that.
- merpkz
What did Microslop change in Xbox One that prevented it from being exploited much in the same way? Afaik Xbone is still undefeated in terms of security, either because it's so good or because it's just uninteresting console to own
- david-gpu
Tangential history: to this day there's still DNA from the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360 inside every Snapdragon GPU (Adreno).
Way back around 2008, AMD was bleeding money after its acquisition of ATI. They wanted to divest of their Handheld division, which was the business unit that was producing chips for smartphones. From what I heard through the grapevine, Qualcomm was interested only in some part of it, particularly the GPU IP, but AMD wanted to sell the whole thing, and eventually lowered the price enough that Qualcomm sealed the deal. I was just a nobody, so take that with a grain of salt.
At the time the purchase was finalized in 2009, the GPU was a miniaturized version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360; all the basic parts were there, but the tile memory (GMem) was colocated with the rest of the GPU instead of being in a separate chip. That's what was marketed as the Adreno 200 GPU. It was a pretty quirky shader architecture where each clock issued two instructions: a SIMD vec4, and a scalar op, in VLIW manner, not superscalar. A lot of the time utilization was poor because the compiler couldn't find a way to pack two useful instructions in that manner. But I digress.
Back to the Qualcomm acquisition. It was a very tense period for the workers. Our salaries at AMD had been frozen for a while, and Qualcomm refused to bump our pay. I wish we, the workers, had built a common front to negotiate, but we didn't. As part of the contract, AMD was not allowed to hire us back, […]
- qingcharles
And now we have a working permanent softmod. The Xbox 360 hacking scene is basically complete at this point.
- hizlikovboy27
Did you check whether the glicthing setup still has any advantage? for example on consoles the software exploit doesnt cover?