Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor: The Bad Update Exploit

This blog post details the author's journey to exploit vulnerabilities in the Xbox 360 hypervisor, culminating in a new exploit dubbed "Bad Update." Years after initial attempts, leveraging newfound security engineering expertise, the author meticulously reverse-engineered the hypervisor, focusing on system calls and encrypted memory allocations. By cleverly manipulating ciphertext and exploiting a race condition within an LZX decompression routine in a system update payload, they achieved hypervisor-level code execution. The process involved overcoming numerous obstacles, including cache issues and thread synchronization challenges, demonstrating innovative techniques in vulnerability research.