Free60 - Linux on your Xbox 360 Project

The Free60 Project aims towards porting the open operating systems, such as Linux and Darwin, to the Xbox 360. Currently they’ve gathered a lot of useful and detailed information surrounding the inner workings of the Xbox 360. For example, apparently the Xbox 360 is secured down by the following:

• The flash is encrypted with a per-box key
• The key is stored inside the CPU
• The boot ROM is stored inside the CPU
• Also inside the CPU is a hypervisor that verifies the running state of the kernel, making sure there is no modification (RAM checksums), else the Xbox 360 panics and blows up!
• The CPU contains RAM inside of it to store the checksums
• All interrupt/exception handling is done by the hypervisor
• All code runs in kernel mode
• The emulator for first generation games can be updated via an official Microsoft download burned to CD by the user, though the CDs’ content will be encrypted and signed with public key cryptography.

Be sure to check out their documentation page for further information.

Good luck guys!

Source: Xbox360-Hacks.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Xbox 360, Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.