Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ An unprecedented hack for the Xbox One was recently revealed at the RE//verse 2026 conference. This console has been a forte since its launch in 2013, but now Markus ‘Doom’ Gassdalen has demonstrated the ‘Bliss’ double glitch. Just as the Xbox 360 famously fell into the Reset Glitch Hack (RGH), the Xbox One has now fallen into the Voltage Glitch Hack (VGH).
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“The security of the Xbox ecosystem was somehow cracked in 2013, and the Xbox One has never been hacked,” Gasdelen said in his introduction. The same is true of the Xbox One’s successors, and Microsoft was proud of it. Seven years after its launch, Microsoft engineers will still insist that the Xbox One is “the most secure product Microsoft has ever created.”
What made Xbox One so secure, so special? Gasdelen referenced prior work and presentations to provide this information. I’ve also shared a summary slide about this, but let’s fast-forward to the demo of the new Bliss Hack, which takes place about 46 minutes into the presentation.
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Since a reset error was not possible, Gasdelen thought some voltage error might do the trick. Therefore, instead of tampering with the system rest pin the hacker targeted a momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite an achievement, as Gasdelen could not ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so he had to develop new hardware introspection tools.
Eventually, the Bliss exploit was devised, where two precise voltage disturbances were ground one after the other. One left the loop where ARM Cortex memory protection was installed. The memcpy operation was then targeted during a header read, allowing it to access attacker-controlled data.
As for a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gasdelen says this attack is unproven. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing loading of unsigned code at every level including the hypervisor and the OS. Additionally, Bliss allows access to the security processor so that games, firmware, etc. can be decrypted.
What happens next with this technology remains to be seen. Digital archivists should enjoy new levels of access to Xbox One firmware, OS, games. This effort may lead to later simulation successes. We now also have a way to create a Bliss-a-like mod chip to automate the precise electrical manipulations required.
Whether PC users, our core readership, will actually be interested in emulating the Xbox One seems unlikely. The game library of the 2013 system largely overlaps that on the PC platform, albeit in better quality.
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