codejedi reviewed Hacking the Xbox by Andrew "Bunnie" Huang
Review of 'Hacking the Xbox' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Good book that I got in a humble bundle.
Paperback, 288 pages
Published May 27, 2003 by Xenatera Press.
Andrew "Bunnie" Huang: Hacking the Xbox (2003, Xenatera Press)
- ISBN:
- 978-0-9740575-0-7
- OCLC Number:
- 54613988
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3 stars
(5 reviews)
"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 …
"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.
