Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

Created a voltage drop that exactly occurred to be timed to the key comparison, then a spike at the continuation.

Irl noop and forced execution control flow to effectively return true.

B e a utiful

I think it counts as effectively unhackable since it remained unhacked until five and a half years after its successor went on the market.

I wonder if, assuming they continue making Xbox, they find a way to mitigate this in the next generation.

This is great news. Hopefully this opens the floodgates towards emulation and homebrew. Not that there are really any exclusives, but it would be interesting.

Is there any better format article or writeup? I couldn't find anything.

This just again shows that given enough time skill, and resources, any security is pointless if the attacker has physical access to the device.

Marcus used to work for Microsoft, in the MSRC. I wonder if he used insider knowledge for this hack.

Note this only affects the very first original 2013 "VCR" hardware. Newer revisions and variants are still unaffected.

It wasn't unhackable and decrypted versions of games already have been dumped. There was even a public exploit published years ago.

https://github.com/exploits-forsale/collateral-damage

What's new here is that this compromises the entire system security giving access to the highest privilege level.

One should never call something "unhackable" ...

Is there any better format article or writeup? I couldn't find anything.

Note this only affects the very first original 2013 "VCR" hardware. Newer revisions and variants are still unaffected.

Created a voltage drop that exactly occurred to be timed to the key comparison, then a spike at the continuation.

Irl noop and forced execution control flow to effectively return true.

B e a utiful

It's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.

This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really exciting exploits coming out here!

The earliest example I know of for this is CLKSCREW, but security hardware (like for holding root CA private keys) was hardened against this stuff way before that attack.

Has anyone heard of notable earlier examples?

I think it counts as effectively unhackable since it remained unhacked until five and a half years after its successor went on the market.

I wonder if, assuming they continue making Xbox, they find a way to mitigate this in the next generation.

The presentation notes that this hack currently only works with the first revision of silicon. Later variants have more protections, like some anti-glitching tech that wasn’t quite debugged for the early units being enabled for later runs, and further changes with the security / reset subsystems being split into two separate cores with revised consoles like the the One X. So these would be more of a challenge, even if there’s now an angle of attack to investigate.

> assuming they continue making Xbox

It sounds like that's the plan:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/11/project-helix-buildin...

This is great news. Hopefully this opens the floodgates towards emulation and homebrew. Not that there are really any exclusives, but it would be interesting.

Xbox One homebrew has effectively always been supported. Anyone can register a development account and boot the system into dev mode. IIRC in a talk about console security, a Microsoft developer noted that this was an intentional deterrent against hacking. An effort to split the community so that pirates and homebrew enthusiasts wouldn't have a reason to collaborate.

I'm just excited at the opportunity to re-purpose my old launch day XBone as some kind of little homelab linux box.

This just again shows that given enough time skill, and resources, any security is pointless if the attacker has physical access to the device.

I think this might be a good example of the fundamental misunderstanding of what "security" even is. It is never a binary state. Never was. And I think a lot of people don't really grok that and think that if a security block can be overcome in some manner then the thing is not secure.

Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.

i find this statement is often used as an excuse to not think about security at all. which is probably not what you intended here (i hope, although you did say "pointless"...), but some people parrot it for that purpose.

a) this was a security win. millions and millions of people had physical access to the device for over a decade

b) as others have said, security is not all-or-nothing. the xbox one is extremely secure, despite not being perfectly secure.

c) just because something eventually gets hacked does not mean security was pointless. delaying access is a perfectly reasonable security goal. delaying access until the product is retired and the successor is already out on the market is a huge win.

I can give you a piece of paper with a one time pad encoded secret, where the one time is physically destroyed. You can take all the time you want but you will not crack anything…

One of the DRM circumvention methods for the Xbox 360 involved precision drilling a specific depth into one of the chips on the board. Microsoft was very aware of the nature of physical access while designing this, haha.

This seems like an unqualified win for the security measure. The future value of Xbox One DRM is probably close to zero. They already got what they wanted out of it.

I’m pretty skeptical of that lesson. This took 13 years and it’s cheap mass-market hardware.

You do have a credit card, right?

Marcus used to work for Microsoft, in the MSRC. I wonder if he used insider knowledge for this hack.

Microsoft released a video that covers effectively all of the Xbox One security system, and it's referred to extensively in the talk. The specific methods of glitching don't require any insider knowledge.

One should never call something "unhackable" ...

Given that it held up against 13 years of dedicated efforts by people with physical access to the device, many years after its successor was launched, it seems merited in this case.

This talk about some of what went into it is fascinating: https://youtu.be/quLa6kzzra0

In the very strict interpretation probably nothing is unhackable, just not hacked yet. But one should also be pragmatic about what "unhackable" means in context. Without the power of hindsight, a consumer device that stayed unhacked for ~13 years can be reasonably called unhackable during this time.

I wish people would take statements in relative terms along with the whole context before attempting to refute them with a quick gotcha in absolute terms.

Obviously nothing is ever unhackable, not even Fort Knox, given infinite time and resources, and Microsoft never made such claims, this is just media editorializing for clicks and HN eating the bait, but Xbox One was definitely the most unhackable console of its generation. Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack a 499$ consumer device from 2013. PS4 and iPhones of 2013 have also been jailbroken long ago.

Therefore, even the click-bait statement with context in relative terms is 100% correct, it truly was unhackable during the time it was sold and relative to its peers of the time.

It wasn't unhackable and decrypted versions of games already have been dumped. There was even a public exploit published years ago.

https://github.com/exploits-forsale/collateral-damage

What's new here is that this compromises the entire system security giving access to the highest privilege level.

The earliest example I know of for this is CLKSCREW, but security hardware (like for holding root CA private keys) was hardened against this stuff way before that attack.

Has anyone heard of notable earlier examples?

> assuming they continue making Xbox

It sounds like that's the plan:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/03/11/project-helix-buildin...

I'm just excited at the opportunity to re-purpose my old launch day XBone as some kind of little homelab linux box.

Eventually Fort Knox will succumb to the unrelenting arrow of time and some future visitors will simply step over the crumbling wall and into the supposedly "secure" area.

a) this was a security win. millions and millions of people had physical access to the device for over a decade

b) as others have said, security is not all-or-nothing. the xbox one is extremely secure, despite not being perfectly secure.

I can give you a piece of paper with a one time pad encoded secret, where the one time is physically destroyed. You can take all the time you want but you will not crack anything…

Thanks for the mention! I helped with the collateral damage exploit (wrote the PE loader).

I didn't ask but Emma -- who wrote the kernel-mode exploit -- and I would probably agree that Collat is not really what we would consider a proper hack of the console since it didn't compromise HostOS. Neither of us really expected game plaintext to be accessible from SRA mode though.

Could a chip detect this and reset?

You can't. Console makers have these locked-down little systems with all the security they can economically justify... embedded in an arbitrarily-hostile environment created by people who have no need to economically justify anything. It's completely asymmetrical and the individual hackers hold most of the cards. There's no "this exploit is too bizarre" for people whose hobby is breaking consoles, and if even one of those bizarre exploits wins it's game over.

And if you predict the next dozen bizarre things someone might try, you both miss the thirteenth thing that's going to work and you make a console so over-engineered Sony can kick your ass just by mentioning the purchase price of their next console. ("$299", the number that echoed across E3.)

This seems like an unqualified win for the security measure. The future value of Xbox One DRM is probably close to zero. They already got what they wanted out of it.

I’m pretty skeptical of that lesson. This took 13 years and it’s cheap mass-market hardware.

You do have a credit card, right?

Could a chip detect this and reset?

Given that it held up against 13 years of dedicated efforts by people with physical access to the device, many years after its successor was launched, it seems merited in this case.

This talk about some of what went into it is fascinating: https://youtu.be/quLa6kzzra0

It literally got hacked, that's what the article is about. It is NOT unhackable.

"Extremely hard to hack" or "Hackable only after it's retired" don't exactly roll off the tongue, but they are not synonymous with "Unhackable".

In many cases the truth is simply that its not worth the time/effort to hack it, so only the most dedicated perverts(with a positive connotation) keep trying.

We don't need to contribute to word inflation. There's "really hard," there's "nearly impossible," there's even "impossible – as far as we know." I don't think it shows a lack of pragmatism to assume a technological claim, made by a technology company, should't be taken at face value. On the contrary, I'd advise more pragmatism to anyone failing to disregard an "unhackable" claim made by Microsoft specially even after fixnum years without known exploits.

I think it's like calling a ship "unsinkable". Yes, you engineered it to not sink, in accordance with strict maritime standards no doubt, but just don't call it unsinkable. If you call it unsinkable you're just begging for a century of snickering at your hubris.

I wish people would take statements in relative terms along with the whole context before attempting to refute them with a quick gotcha in absolute terms.

Therefore, even the click-bait statement with context in relative terms is 100% correct, it truly was unhackable during the time it was sold and relative to its peers of the time.

This goes against information theory as a whole, and the point of words. How are you going to convey all this extra context to people who don't follow the space, and what word(s) do we use for something that is actually unhackable?

Literally unhackable? XD

> Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack it.

Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles? I'm not very familiar with the Xbox scene, but I would assume that there was a lot less drive to achieve this given that Xbox has never really had many big exclusive titles and remains the least popular major console (with an abysmally tiny market presence outside of the US).

As an aside, I wonder if Microsoft's extra effort into securing the platform comes from their tighter partnership with media distributors/streaming platforms and their off-and-on demonstrated desire to position the Xbox as a home media center more than just a gaming console.

Thanks for the mention! I helped with the collateral damage exploit (wrote the PE loader).

"Extremely hard to hack" or "Hackable only after it's retired" don't exactly roll off the tongue, but they are not synonymous with "Unhackable".

In many cases the truth is simply that its not worth the time/effort to hack it, so only the most dedicated perverts(with a positive connotation) keep trying.

Literally unhackable? XD

It literally got hacked, that's what the article is about. It is NOT unhackable.

Microsoft stopped manufacturing in 2020. It was not hacked in its lifetime.

To the community it was unhackable, until very recently. It's security measures held up so long that it appeared to be unshakable. There were no obvious flaws. In hindsight it was hackable, but keep in mind how long it took. This console has long been obsoleted.

It was unhackable while it mattered. It was hacked 5 years after it no longer mattered. And all but the effectively beta release remain unhacked even now.

It has no relation to hubris whatsoever if the "unhackable" label is not something self-proclaimed at launch but something descriptively applied by other people who were unable to hack it. Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

> Case in point, it took 13 years of constant community effort to hack it.

> Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles?

The person who hacked the original Xbox wrote a book on the topic, which they've since made free: https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

I too forget sometimes that Wii U existed.

>and remains the least popular major console (with an abysmally tiny market presence outside of the US).

TF are you on about? The xbox one of 2013(competitor of the PS4 who got hacked long before) had a ~46% market share in the US and ~35% globally. Hardly insignificant. And any Microsoft Product, even those with much lower market share, attracts significant attention from hackers since it's worth a lot in street-cred, plus the case of reusing cheap consoles as general PCs for compute since HW used to be subsidized. And of course for piracy, game preservation and homebrew reasons.

I again tap the sign of my previous comment, of uring people to stop jumping the gun to talk out of their ass, without knowing and considering the full context.

It was unhackable while it mattered. It was hacked 5 years after it no longer mattered. And all but the effectively beta release remain unhacked even now.

I too forget sometimes that Wii U existed.

> Can you attempt to quantify this effort in comparison to other game consoles?

The person who hacked the original Xbox wrote a book on the topic, which they've since made free: https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

>and remains the least popular major console (with an abysmally tiny market presence outside of the US).

I again tap the sign of my previous comment, of uring people to stop jumping the gun to talk out of their ass, without knowing and considering the full context.

Microsoft stopped manufacturing in 2020. It was not hacked in its lifetime.

I agree, but also find it funny that by that standard the DRM in the original Google video streaming product was not hacked before the service was shutdown, after about 2 years :)

> Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

Pedantic: I'm sure somebody would have snickered about "unsinkable" if the Titanic sank after 10 years. Pragmatic: if the "unsinkable" Titanic lasted 10 years (or at least to profitability) before being sunk by people intending to sink it, that might certainly count as being "unsinkable" for the time it hadn't sunk.

Hubris: Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable before it was launched.

I agree, but also find it funny that by that standard the DRM in the original Google video streaming product was not hacked before the service was shutdown, after about 2 years :)

> Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

Hubris: Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable before it was launched.

A groundbreaking hack for Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One was revealed at the recent RE//verse 2026 conference. This console has remained a fortress since its launch in 2013, but now Markus ‘Doom’ Gaasedelen has showcased the ‘Bliss’ double glitch. Just as the Xbox 360 famously fell to the Reset Glitch Hack (RGH), the Xbox One has now fallen to Voltage Glitch Hacking (VGH).

RE//verse 2026: Hacking the Xbox One - YouTube

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“In 2013 some kind of iron curtain came down on security, of the Xbox ecosystem, and the Xbox One never got hacked,” noted Gaasedelen in his introduction. The same is true of the Xbox One’s successors, and Microsoft was rightly proud. Seven years after its launch, Microsoft engineers would still assert that the Xbox One was “the most secure product Microsoft has ever produced.”

The Bliss Xbox One hack

(Image credit: Markus ‘Doom’ Gaasedelen video presentation)

What made the Xbox One so secure, so special? Gaasedelen referenced prior work and presentations to convey this information. I’ve shared a summary slide about this, too, but let’s fast forward to the demo of the new Bliss hack, which takes place from about 46 minutes into the presentation.

Article continues below

Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.

Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data.

Image

As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.

What happens next with this technique remains to be seen. Digital archivists should enjoy new levels of access to Xbox One firmware, OS, games. There could be subsequent emulation breakthroughs thanks to this effort. We also now have a route to making a Bliss-a-like mod chip to automate the precise electrical glitching required.

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Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

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Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

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