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Pandora's box opened: Xbox One SDK leaked

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 2 Jan 2015, 9:28am

Pandora's box opened: Xbox One SDK leaked

The Xbox One is the second current generation console to be hacked, after the Wii U.

We start the new year with a bang, especially if you're tuned into the gaming scene. It seems like a group of hackers have somehow gained access to the Xbox One's SDK and have subsequently released it to the public. The group, going by the moniker H4LT, released the program online and revealed their leak via their twitter account.

What's an SDK and what does it mean for everybody? An SDK is a Software Development Kit. It basically gives tools and programs to whoever uses to create content for the Xbox One. Games, apps and whatever else in between, everything's created with an SDK. With access to one, it basically gives anybody who uses it the ability to create content that Xbox One can understand and execute. Of course, it's a much more complicated than that, but the basic gist of it is that right now, the Xbox One is wide open for anybody who has the SDK.

Whether anything will come out of it is another story. The PS3 SDK was leaked for months before exploits utilizing it was able to function and in the early going, even needed hardware dongles to enable them. It wasn't till a leaked firmware update from Sony that hackers were finally able to unlock the PS3 and get access to its innermost systems.

Also, the release of an SDK may not mean much, especially for the Xbox One. Microsoft has previously made mention of their intention to turn all Xbox Ones into an SDK console with a simple software toggle, essentially giving anybody with the console a SDK to tinker with. If that's still on the cards, one might think they'd already have (or soon will have) safeguards in place created just to prevent unauthorized hacking, which means that this is just a bump on the road. Also, the SDK released might be outdated with signatures that may now be flagged by Microsoft, which basically means any content created (signed) with the leaked SDK will be rejected by updated consoles.

On the other hand, the plans to give everybody access to a SDK seem to have been scrapped by Microsoft as they've made no mention of it recently. This could mean, the theoretical safeguards may be incomplete or don't even exist. Sure, they'll be basic security to keep curious eyes out but now that an SDK is in the wild, there'll be other avenues for hackers to exploit that might not be covered by the basic console security.

The good news to take from all of this is that a ton of homebrew programs could be on the way. The PS3, when hacked, gave it a multitude of different functions from emulators to media players akin to those on the PC (with supports for file formats the default PS3 media player doesn't have). Not only could homebrew create useful functions, it might even lead to Microsoft adopting some of them officially.

The bad news is that this may lead to piracy and worse, game hacking. The Xbox 360 and PS3 have been plagued by hackers in supposedly secure games, most recently seen in Destiny. Hackers in that game gave themselves unlimited ammo, bottomless clips for guns (no reloading) and much more, which ruined the game for other players.

A screen showing Destiny running on a hacked 360. The ammo counter on the bottom left displays an ammo count that is impossible on normal versions of the game.

Of course, using homebrew or modifying the console will lead to a ban if detected. But if the Xbox 360 and PS3 hacking scene is any indication, hackers seem to be able to fool the cracked systems into thinking they are running official code, leading to hacked consoles being used online with zero consequence (which in turn lead to the hacking in online games). This too could happen on the Xbox One.

We'll just have to wait to see how it turns out but no matter what happens, it'll be interesting nonetheless.

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