Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss' — the 2013 console finally fell to voltage glitching, allowing the loading of unsigned code at every level

A groundbreaking hack for Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One was revealed at the recent RE//verse 2026 conference.

Tom's Hardware

Created a voltage drop that exactly occurred to be timed to the key comparison, then a spike at the continuation.

Irl noop and forced execution control flow to effectively return true.

B e a utiful

It's fascinating - how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails with enough precision to bypass any instruction one writes? It's an entirely new class of vulnerability, as far as I can tell.

This talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXKhrHi2eY indicates that others have had success doing this on Intel microcode as well - only in the past few months. Going to be some really exciting exploits coming out here!

m0leCon 2025 - Federico Cerutti - Voltage Glitching Intel Microcode

YouTube

You can't. Console makers have these locked-down little systems with all the security they can economically justify... embedded in an arbitrarily-hostile environment created by people who have no need to economically justify anything. It's completely asymmetrical and the individual hackers hold most of the cards. There's no "this exploit is too bizarre" for people whose hobby is breaking consoles, and if even one of those bizarre exploits wins it's game over.

And if you predict the next dozen bizarre things someone might try, you both miss the thirteenth thing that's going to work and you make a console so over-engineered Sony can kick your ass just by mentioning the purchase price of their next console. ("$299", the number that echoed across E3.)

> You can't

It's a moot point, they are not trying to prevent it. They only need to buy enough time to sell games in the lifespan of the hardware, which they did.

> all the security they can economically justify...

It seems like they did a perfect job, it lasted long enough to protect Microsoft game profits.

Well, they had better hope nobody notices how to use this flaw to chain into another one in the current generation.