Jailbreaking the 3DS through 7 years of hardening

Presented at DEF CON 26 (2018), Aug. 11, 2018, 11 a.m. (45 minutes).

The 3DS was one of Nintendo's first serious attempts at security, featuring a cool microkernel based OS and actual exploit mitigations. That didn't stop it from getting hacked pretty hard, making it possible for people to write their own homebrew software for the console. But Nintendo isn't one to back off from a fight and, as a result, has put significant effort into not only fixing vulnerabilities but also introducing new security features targeted specifically at killing exploit techniques used by hackers. This talk will describe hacking the console through all these defensive features by walking through a 0-day exploit chain that takes us all the way from zero access to a full system jailbreak.


Presenters:

  • smea - Hacker
    smea got his start making video games for closed consoles like the Nintendo DS using whatever hacks were available at the time. At some point consoles started getting actual security features and he transitioned from simply making homebrew software to making the jailbreaks that let people run it. He's best known for his work on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U but has also done exploitation work against high profile web browsers and virtualization stacks. @smealum, https://github.com/smealum

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