3DS System Flaws

Exploits are used to execute unofficial code (homebrew) on the Nintendo 3DS. This page is a list of known 3DS-mode exploits.

List of 3DS exploits

There are currently no known 3DS-mode exploits.

Failed attempts

Here are listed all attempts at exploiting 3DS software that have failed so far.

• Pushmo (3DSWare), QR codes: level name is properly limited to 16 characters, game doesn't crash with a longer name. The only possible crashes are triggered by out-of-bounds values, these crashes are caused by the application attempting to load a ptr from a buffer located at NULL.
• Pyramids (3DSWare), QR codes: no strings. The LZ10 compression can't be exploited either. Only crashes are from out-of-bounds values (like background ID) and are not exploitable.
• 3DS browser, 2^32 characters long string: this is the same vuln fixed here, concat-large-strings-crash2.html triggers a crash which is basically the same as the one triggered by a 2^32 string. Most of the time this vuln will cause a memory page permissions fault, since the webkit code attempts to copy the string text data to the output buffer located in read-only heap memory. Any attempt at exploiting this on 3DS has failed so far.

Current efforts

There are people working on finding exploits and documenting the 3DS. Here's a list of some current efforts being made to make homebrew on the 3DS possible:

• Neimod has been working on a RAM dumping setup for a little while now. He's desoldered the 3DS's RAM chip and hooked it and the RAM pinouts on the 3DS's PCB up to a custom RAM dumping setup. Recent photos show that the setup is working quite well, with the 3DS successfully booting up. Pictures of neimod's work can be found on his Flickr stream.

• to long or corrupted strings (01Ah 2 Nickname length in characters 050h 2 Message length in characters) in the NVRAM DS user settings cause (System Settings/Other Settings/Profile/Nintendo DS Profile to crush) (this is still 3DS mode)

Tips and info

Information on the 3DS's internals is scarce. There is little information on programming the 3DS available, other than basic information found by taking the 3DS apart, leaks and reverse engineering.

What this means is if any exploits are found, it would be very difficult to do anything useful with them. Work is currently being done to find out how the 3DS ticks and to aid in finding exploits. See the current efforts section of this page for examples and more information.

The 3DS uses the XN feature of the ARM processor, and only apps that have the necessary permissions in their headers can set memory to be executable. This means that although a usable buffer overflow exploit would still be useful, it would not go the entire way towards allowing code to be run in an easy/practical fashion (ie an actual homebrew launcher) - for that, an exploit in the kernel would probably need to be found. A buffer overflow exploit does, however, provide enough wriggle room through the use of return-oriented programming to potentially trigger a kernel exploit if and when a useful one is found.

SD card extdata and SD savegames can be attacked, for consoles where the console-unique movable.sed was dumped.