[weli]

The incentives to hack the XOne were few. Easy sideloading. No exclusives. Not a great performance per dollar ratio either. It is the opposite of Nintendo consoles if you think about it, and nintendo consoles are notorious for having a really quick homebrew scene.

[tverbeure]

Every time a console gets hacked, the checklist of SOC security architects grows a little longer. Boot ROMs are written in formally verifiable language, there are hardware glitch detectors, CPUs running in lockstep to guard against glitches, checks against out of order completion of security phases, random delay insertion, and so forth.

When it comes to SOC security, the past is not a good predictor of the present. The previous Nintendo SOC was designed 15 years ago. A lot has been learned since. It's become increasingly harder to bypass these mechanisms.

The fact that it took 13 years to hack the Xbox One is not because it's not an attractive platform: because of its high profile, it has been a popular subject for security research grad students from the moment it was released. And if anything, the complexity of the current hack shows how much SOC security has progressed over the years.