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Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005)

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The developers at Microsoft had a brilliant idea how to solve this problem: They designed an interpreter for a virtual machine that can read and write memory, access the PCI config space, do "AND" and "OR" calculations, jump conditionally etc. Andrew "bunnie" Huang, then a PhD student at the MIT, disassembled his Xbox, saw the flash memory, de-soldered it, extracted the contents, put it on his website and got a phone call from one of Microsoft's lawyers. But it didn't make that much of a difference, as bunnie sniffed the busses, and eventually dumped the complete secret ROM, including the RC4 key from HyperTransport, using a custom built sniffer - after all, he was working on his PhD degree about high performance computing, and he could use the excellent resources of the MIT hardware lab.

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