Comment by IshKebab
7 hours ago
I definitely think AI is going to change this. Astra is shockingly good at reverse engineering. I was working with a proprietary software library and I just asked it how some (poorly documented) function worked and it just went off and disassembled it without me even prompting. I asked it if there was a way of disabling some error checks and it went and found some undocumented functions (not in the header), disassembled them and figured out how to use them for me.
I didn't actually even give it the ability to run this code and it could still reverse engineer everything.
I've been surprised how much Astra prefers to go off script to "find the answer" than Sol was unprompted.
I've been doing some PCB design lately, and I was working up the firmware with Codex and asked about how to handle a specific part of my SPI setup. The firmware and KiCad hardware are in different folders/repos so none of it was in-context, but Astra just decided to `find` the folder nearby, then read the KiCad net lists by directly invoking the KiCad CLI on the .kicad_sch/.kicad_pcb files it found. Topped it off by reading the Espressif code vendored in my PlatformIO install to make sure everything would work.
For now, but I think eventually the hardware companies will catch on and build everything much more locked down with signed firmwares, keys burned in to the chip, encrypted communications with accessories, etc.
Why haven't then done this things so far?
This is what’s done for phones, game consoles, and other devices where hackers have been ripping open in the past, but most other consumer devices haven’t utilised these modern security features yet.
Once we start seeing websites that can brick devices over webusb we might see more security.