April 15, 2003
Interview with XBox Security Researcher
News.com has an interview with Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, who has researched how to hack the XBox.
Interesting quote: “Right after I did the paper, I worked with a guy to find the avenues to completely bypass the Xbox security systems. And what we ended up with was amazing. It was a concatenation of four bugs from various vendors that allowed it to happen. It’s a real-life example of why I think Palladium isn’t going to work–every vendor is going to have some small bug that individually doesn’t mean much, but when you stack ’em together, it becomes a big security hole. And once you commit it to silicon, it becomes a billion-dollar bug.”
The feasibilty of something like Palladium still fascinates me. First, it’ll be interesting to see if Palladium will really be as hackable as Huang says. This sort of DRM seems to be the way of future. If it can’t work, it’s going to provide even more impetus for the entertainment companies to alter their business models — or, to pursue harsh legislation. Second, I wonder if finding a hardware hack will be significant for most people. Finding, downloading, and running some software is pretty easy for moderately motivated individuals. I don’t imagine the same is true for hacking hardware. So, what impact would these hacks actually have on the general success of hardware-based DRM?
Filed by Derek Slater at 8:37 pm under General news
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