Nintendo Will Pay You To Hack Your 3DS
In an odd move, Nintendo is turning to online hacking communities to help find vulnerabilities in their extremely popular handheld, Nintendo 3DS. According to a recent listing on HackerOne, Nintendo is offering anywhere between $100 to $20,000 to find holes in their software that could lead to piracy, cheating, or dissemination of inappropriate content to children.
HackerOne is an online “vulnerability coordination and bug bounty program” where various companies — ranging from GM to Uber to Slack — ask users to find exploitable bugs within their programs. Nintendo is looking for a bunch of different errors that can occur on the 3DS, prioritizing game application dumping, save data modification, and game data modifaction. However, it seems like they are also interested in both userland takeovers and kernel takeovers of ARM9 and ARM11 — the processors behind the handhelds.
HackerOne reported the following:
“Nintendo is offering an incentive to the world’s finest researchers to find and report security vulnerabilities for the Nintendo 3DS family of handheld game systems. In coordination with HackerOne, Nintendo will pay up to U.S. $20,000 for the discovery of critical security vulnerabilities. Nintendo is dedicated to providing video game fans worldwide premium entertainment in a welcoming and secure environment. To that end, Nintendo invites highly skilled researchers to find and address vulnerabilities on the Nintendo 3DS handheld system that could jeopardize that environment. Nintendo is committed to creating a better game-play experience for all through those actions.”