Andrew "bunnie" Huang
More info
- Known for
- The Xbox hack, Novena, Precursor
- Book
- Hacking the Xbox (2003)
Hardware hacker who broke the original Xbox's security with a home-built bus tap and has since devoted himself to building computers you can actually inspect.
As an MIT grad student in 2002, Huang sniffed the bus between the Xbox's chips, captured the secret key hidden in its boot ROM and showed that Microsoft's whole chain of trust hinged on a single leak. Hacking the Xbox followed in 2003, after the first publisher backed out for fear of the DMCA.
He has spent the years since building open hardware out of Singapore: the Linux-powered Chumby, the Novena laptop (2014) and the Precursor secure handheld. In 2016 he and Matthew Green, represented by the EFF, sued the US government over DMCA Section 1201, which criminalises precisely the kind of research that made his name.