Hacking the Xbox
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
"Hacking the Xbox" is a fascinating book about exactly what it says. If you have no interest in gory details of JTAG probe points, cryptography, so called "trusted computing" and "digital rights management" and the technical issues at stake in trying to implement and/or attack them... then this book will bore you to tears. If you *do* have such interests, then you are in for a treat.
The book opens with 5 chapters of fairly broad physical overview, walking through the hardware systems in Xbox consoles and some (relatively) simple projects to get your hands dirty with a soldering iron. Then on to some meaty chapters introducing you to the security model of the platform, and the attacks that the author and others developed to ultimately succeed at running arbitrary code on these systems. These chapters provide a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the process of developing the attacks. Then, we wrap up with some practical material regarding how to use these attacks to run, for instance, Xbox-Linux on a hacked machine, and some bigger picture information on the legal environment facing US hackers interested in these matters.
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Unfortunately, this book is crippled by legal issues. It's clearly censored from what Huang wants to say, alluding to how much trouble he could be in if he actually talks about how to hack the xbox. So the best you're going to get here is how to install an LED, and some theoretical ideas about how one might go about hacking an xbox. I was hoping to see the nuts and bolts behind how this was done, hoping to extrapolate the technique to other domains. But there is no technique, and most of the book is filler on computational complexity, interviews with other people, and a big 20% chapter on the legality of doing any of this in the first place (written by someone else.)
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