"console security is getting really good." - It's not nor will it ever be.
There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example. Developers aim for secure enough and don't care much about a single nerd who cracked his individual system using exotic specialists tools more valuable than the console and the entire game collection combined. It's more lucrative to just send a lawyer. ( Until it goes wrong. )
I would class making it uneconomical to hack a console for any practical purpose as "really good security". Could someone with nation-state resources hack the Xbox? Maybe? But who cares, they're not going to.
Funny, I was just wondering if such an entity would not actually quite like the xbox and Playstation as targets. I mean, they are powerful machines, well connected to the internet and the ownership class by and large dont blink when they power them on and are told they need to download a system update or game patch. Feels like a fertile place to build a bot net?
I wonder if you really even need to hack the console. It might be easier to, say, subvert Rockstar's supply chain to put some code in the next GTA that spent a few cycles doing whatever botnets need to be doing.
Tony Chen even addresses this directly in the video above.
They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care.
The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
Another smart move by Microsoft was shipping Xboxes in an uninitialized state that has to connect to the internet and download the latest firmware before it can be used. Sony has been repeatedly burned by patching an exploit but having the vulnerable firmware still pre-installed on machines still in retail channels, so someone willing to abuse return policies can easily get one. MS doesn't need to worry about that, every new Xbox ends up on the latest firmware regardless of when it was manufactured.
PS5 and XS was attractive hack target for crypto mining when it was boom and GPU were in shortage. I wonder anyone had hacked it (and keep it secret) or hadn't.
>There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example.
TPM designs that protect against such an attack will become a commodity reducing the cost to include it onto a console. Every desktop, phone, laptop, tablet, microwave, fridge, server, etc will all need TPMs. The demand and scale exists for this to become cheap over time.
