How come there are no viruses for the PS4 and Xbox One

even though they have been out for years and use the same X86_64 processor as PCs?

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People don't conduct meaningful business besides video game sales on the xbone or the pisspoor.

Can consoles even run arbitrary code? It's much harder to infect people when they can't click on "yes, please rape my computer" while reading spam.

It's not the hardware, it's the software. It's proprietary and locked down, people can't exploit it. It's hard enough to run arbitrary code on the devices, let alone run arbitrary code that exploits the device.


Wrong. You could easily make something that steals payment information from accounts and when people buy games digitally. You could also swipe PSN and Xbox Live accounts.

That's not the reason. People have cracked consoles before in order to play pirated games, that counts as an exploit.

Not to mention all the exploits that have come out for proprietary pieces of software. Your post seems to imply only open source is vulnerable to malware.

Because the PS4 runs FreeBSD and the Xbone has no users

You don't need to exploit the FreeBSD kernel, consoles have plenty of software that runs on top of it.

Yeah, but it must be pretty difficult considering that the only exploit for either that has surfaced is one for the PS4 and it uses an old webkit exploit to trigger it from there i think it might use some kind of exploit involving dlopen

I think the ps4's operating system is encrypted and stored in either nand or on the hard drive, probably on nand, if hard drives are easily swapped so it's difficult to find new exploits, now that the webkit exploit gave H4x0rz code execution abilities, they can dump the operating system and begin reversing for better exploits.

I'd be checking the bluetooth, usb, and all other possible input devices for exploits.

If you could find a bluetooth exploit and build a device that used bluetooth to 'root' ps4's you might stand to make a lot of money if you sold it and more than likely be on your way to prison or court as well

There are probably all kinds of private hacks for consoles that are passed around well before they ever see any public release

Yeah but it's not like Nintendo's junk where you can nop-rop from a QR scanner right into kernel space

Because the systems are so centralized this would be noticed and shut down probably well before anyone could exploit it to make it worth the effort.

The reason criminals make viruses almost exclusively for PCs is because all the worlds small and mid level business is done on PCs. Sorry to inform you of this, but your video game collection is chump change compared to what most businesses spend on a daily basis.
We are talking about someone investing 200,000 on a machine tool. Not some kid spending his parents money on a game.
Because business is so complex and distributed all around the world they can run an exploit and then just move on when it gets discovered.

there are probably various exploits that are pretty cross platform, but that people just don't bother to run on consoles

"bad USB" firmware exploits, and rowhammer, to name a couple

Microsoft has been using hardware-based memory encryption since the Xbox original. This has made it a pain in the fucking ass to find exploits through memory dumps and memory injection

The PS4 makes extensive use of FreeBSD Jails to sandbox all their applications. In addition, Sony was careful to disable kernel calls that could lead to a potential exploit. Finally, the PS4 is x86_64, like you mentioned already, which means Sony is able to take security patches directly from FreeBSD mainline without much of the issues that come with porting C-based security patches to new architectures.

Nintendo uses their own inhouse kernel/OS. The 3DS in particular uses 2 different processors alltogether for the kernel and usermode respectively. The kernel runs on an ARM9 CPU while the usermode (the home menu itself, applications.etc) run on the ARM11 CPU. Nintendo did something similar with the Wii, inside the PowerPC CPU was a small integrated ARM9 CPU that ran the IOS used to run applications

Video game consoles, believe it or not, are important to the security community. A lot of game console exploits are found through contributions from security researchers. They allow for developers to test their skills by exploiting targets that their manufactures consider "high-target" while also not having to attack anything mission-critical. All that security research goes back into general-purpose operating system security research

Yes, there is a rootable exploit in the webkit browser shipped on older firmware revisions.

Daily reminder that you could once enter any local Xbone account by failing the password and then entering all spaces on the next try
Daily reminder that the finder of the exploit was a 5 year old kid
Daily reminder that the kid's father was a security researcher

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You would need to trick Microsoft and Sony into doing it the way people on rare occasion have gotten malware into the iOS app store. Your familiar with DRM (defectivebydesign.org/), right. I know it's kind of useful in this case, but it mean absolutely not software of any kind at all gets on these devices with out Microsoft's and Sony's permission. Unless you modchip you console, you will never play a Sonic fangame or use a bittorrent client, never mind a virus, LOL.

Because they're so locked down you're lucky if you have permission to change your wallpaper.

In all reality though I'm sure there are exploits for the console but I imagine it's hard to actually infect when it's run on a private network and the built in browser (at least as I remember for the ps3) is a neutered shell of an actual Internet browser. I've never touched or seen a ps4 in action but they probably limit the shit out of what the console can run especially with the jailbreak escapades of the previous generation.

I guess the bonus of the cage is it's hard for shit to get in as well.

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the operating system is the virus op.

you can't run code that isn't signed with the master encryption key, you have to steal the encryption key by either cracking it through hardware methods such as nand mirrior brute force, or by gaining access to xbox live servers that allow you to upload new programs to the xbox live market place thus giving you access to generate keys for the operating system.

the encryption is either too strong, or the people who know how to crack it are probably being payed not to.

There are virus for the Vita, though its more like a "delete system32.bat" kind of deal disguised as a game.

All it takes is an exploit that allows you to run unsigned code and someone willing to do it.

They won't run unsigned code.

Because it runs some locked down version of BSD that won't allow code execution you dumb coon.

Yet there was a virus for the Vita to brick it. What an age we live in.

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How are things like this possible? Reminds me of that story of linux being vulnerable to holding down the enter key for 70 seconds. Amazingly simple when you consider how much goes into protecting them.