Throughout this book, I include profiles of various hackers who have agreed to be interviewed. This set of hackers is by no means the only set of hackers; in fact, it is a self-selecting group, since many hackers work in secrecy for fear persecution or because they are employed by companies with strong connections to Microsoft. The goal of these interviews is to introduce a little bit about the people behind the hacks, and to introduce their motivations and methods to promote understanding and to inspire new hackers to join our ranks.
Let me start the process by introducing myself. I’m Andrew “bunnie”
Huang; most people call me bunnie. As of this writing, I was 27 years old, the son of Andrew C. and Margaret Huang. I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but I currently live in San Diego, California, with my wonderful fianceé, Nikki Justis. I recently graduated from MIT with a PhD in Electrical Engineering. One of the reasons I was selected to write this book about Xbox Hacking is because I discovered and published the first known weakness in the Microsoft Xbox’s security system.
In general, I hack because it is quite satisfying to know that somebody’s life was made better by something I built. I feel it is my obligation to apply my talents and return to society what it has given me. I also enjoy the challenge of exploration. I want to understand electronics as deeply as I can. Black boxes frustrate me; nothing gets my curiosity going more than a box that I’m not allowed to open or understand. As a result, I have a fiduciary interest in cryptography and security methods.
I hack hardware because I enjoy the aesthetics of electronics; there is some-thing satisfying about having a tangible artifact at the end of the day, as opposed to ephemeral bits of software code. It may sound a little bit silly, but one of my pastimes is taking apart electronic devices and “reading”
the circuit boards. There is something exciting about the smell of brand new electronics equipment, fresh out of their anti-static bags; I think it is the smell of a new adventure unfolding. It is inviting, like a stack of blank paper: I wonder what I will do with those blank pages. A stack of blank, white paper stands there and challenges me to fill it with useful informa-tion.
My inquisitive nature stems from my childhood. When I was about seven years old, my father bought an Apple II clone. He bought just the motherboard, so it didn’t have a case. I still remember when he first took
it out of the box – the green circuit board, the shiny chips, and all the colorful resistors and capacitors. I wanted to play with it! Curious as I was about the Apple II, I was not allowed to touch the motherboard. Of course, this meant that whenever my parents weren’t looking, I was taking the chips out of their sockets on the motherboard and doing silly things like putting them in backwards to see what would happen.
After nearly destroying the computer a few times, my parents bought me a 200-in-1 electronics experimenter kit from Radio Shack and my first electronics book, Getting Started in Electronics, by Forrest Mims, III. These were a great introduction to electronics for me, as they satisfied my desire to play with circuits and components. My uncle also gave me his old copy of the Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill, along with a couple of books about microprocessors. I subscribed to Byte magazine, which back in the day included regular columns about hardware projects, complete with schematics and pictures.
Eventually, I developed enough of a sense of electronics to begin understanding the schematics and the ROM listings included in the Apple II user manuals. (I still believe that computers should ship with full schematics and source code.) By the eighth grade, I had developed just enough understanding to be able to build my own add-in card for the Apple II. The card had a General Instruments SPO-256 speech synthe-sizer that I had purchased from Radio Shack. I also added an analog to digital converter to my Apple II and wrote an application that turned my Apple II into a talking voltmeter. I continued to build hardware, and before I was admitted to MIT I had built my own working embedded computer using an 80188 microprocessor.
During my undergraduate years at MIT, I dodged the drudgery of schoolwork by building fun little projects, such as a remote controlled light switch and music-responsive party lights for my fraternity, ZBT. It was during these years that I was first introduced to affordable
prototyping services and PCB CAD tools, such as those discussed in Appendix C, “Getting Into PCB Layout.”
The rise of circuit board fabrication services to fit a college student’s budget is a landmark event for hardware hackers. Finally, the wire-wrap tool can be put away, and surface-mount components and complex circuits are within the reach of everyday hobbyists.
Over the years, I have made a point of writing up my projects on my webpage (http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie) so that everyone can benefit from my experiences. Many of my projects are available with schematics, Gerber files and source code, although some of my more recent projects have been consulting jobs so I unfortunately cannot share those results with the world.
While I have your attention, I would like to set one thing straight. I did not get my PhD thesis at MIT for hacking the Xbox. Hacking the Xbox was actually a diversion from my thesis that was tangentially related, but not central to my thesis topic.
8 The text of my PhD thesis can be found at http://
www.xenatera.com/bunnie/phdthesis.pdf
9 “A Minimal Trusted Computing Base for Dynamically Ensuring Secure Information Flow” by Jeremy Brown and Tom Knight can be found at http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/aries/Documents/
Memos/ARIES-15.pdf
My thesis on supercomputers focused on an architecture for efficient code and data migration. My interest in video game consoles stems from my natural curiosity about all hardware combined with the encourage-ment of my thesis adviser, Dr. Tom Knight. Video game consoles represent the pinnacle of performance per cost, and cost is a significant issue for supercomputers today. Hence, I was encouraged to look at all video game consoles to see what I could learn about building cost-effective hardware. The fact that the Xbox also had an interesting security system was a bonus; since government agencies have a great interest in supercomputer technology, the security of supercomputers is always a topic for consideration. (In fact, a very interesting paper about building trustable computers9 was written by colleagues in my research group; I recommend reading it if you are curious about alternatives to crypto-graphically secured trusted computing platforms, such as Palladium and TCPA.)
My best advice to aspiring hardware hackers is to be persistent and to be thorough. Significantly, persistence and thoroughness come naturally if you love what you are doing. Also, part of being a hardware hacker is being a pack rat. Buying new equipment is prohibitively expensive, so I accumu-late broken and depreciated equipment and tools habitually, even if I don’t know exactly what I might do with them, or if I can fix them. It turns out that trying to fix test equipment is a learning experience in itself, and can be quite rewarding even if the conclusion is to junk the darn thing for spare parts.
To quote former Apple Evangelist and current Executive of Garage Technology Ventures Guy Kawasaki, “eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.” Kawasaki points out that a hummingbird eats the equivalent of 50% of its body weight every day. Hence, eating like a bird means that you should have an endless appetite for information. Subscribe to free electronics trade magazines, browse the web (but be selective about the sites you browse — you are what you eat), go to free trade shows and sign up for every catalog and periodical you can get your hands on; take apart every piece of electronics that you own and your friends,’ and try to learn all you can from their design.
In hardware hacking, half of your most difficult problems can be solved or made easier by just using the right selection of components or techniques. “Poop like an elephant” refers to sharing your information and discoveries with your fellow hackers. No matter how much informa-tion you digest, you can never know it all. Sharing your findings freely invites the advice and good will of fellow hackers and leads to a synergy of minds. Especially in hardware hacking where all results have a basis in
tangible artifacts, hiding your techniques and results only means that other people will eventually re-invent your work without your help. On the other hand, do exercise some judgment in what you say or share; people only have so much bandwidth and they will listen more closely if you share results that are new or interesting in some way.
That being said, pick up a screwdriver, and let’s start hacking!