Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

Welcome to part 2 of the Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor blog series. In this part I’ll cover how I found and exploited bugs in the Xbox 360 hypervisor to get full code execution and create the “Bad Update” exploit. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read (or at least skim through) part 1 as this post will reference a lot of the material discussed there. As I mentioned in part 1, I consider the Xbox 360 hypervisor to be one of the most secure pieces of code Microsoft has ever written, with only one software bug to date that was likely the result of a compiler issue. I spent a lot of time in the past looking for vulnerabilities in the hypervisor but never found anything of significance. Since then, I’ve spent 7 years working as a security engineer professionally and had developed a whole new mindset for how I analyze targets and find bugs. I was very motivated to put my new skills to the test and see if I could finally hack the Xbox 360 hypervisor. This is what I considered ... Read full article.