The Nintendo Switch’s hardware has been hacked and renders the console “vulnerable, forever”, its hackers claim.
Hackers fail0verflow and Kate Temik have reported on the Fusee Gelee hack, which was designed to encourage homebrew software.
“Given our experiences with past consoles, we’ve been wary of releasing vulnerability details or exploits for fear of them being used primarily for piracy rather than homebrew,” fail0verflow wrote.
“90 days ago, we begun the responsible disclosure process with Google, as Tegra chips are often used in Android devices. The disclosure deadline has now lapsed. The bug will be made public sooner or later, likely sooner, so we might as well release now along with our Linux boot chain and kernel tree, to make it very clear that we do this for fun and homebrew, and nothing else.
“Since this bug is in the Boot ROM, it cannot be patched without a hardware revision, meaning all Switch units in existence today are vulnerable, forever.”
The technology gurus at Digital Foundry have looked into the hack and agree that it “cannot be patched” and that the only way to correct the Boot ROM exploit is to revise the console’s Nvidia Tegra X1 processor.
“And since this is a boot-time bug that does not require touching the onboard eMMC storage, its use is completely undetectable to existing software,” fail0verflow added. “You can dual-boot Linux (via the USB exploit) and the Switch OS (via normal boot) with impunity, forever, as long as you do not try to make changes to the on-board memory (e.g. you can store the Linux filesystem on a second SD card partition or another SD card).”
We’ll keep you up to date as more is learned about the exploit.
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