Comment by timschmidt
5 hours ago
It's always possible to break a perfect system by moving an additional layer of abstraction outward, and attacking one of the assumptions upon which it's built. Some of our era's highest security systems - game consoles - have been broken by undervolting them until the logic failed.
> It's always possible
It's often possible. But not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
And good security uses "defence in depth". Multiple layers which each individually need to be compromised to break the whole thing. To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process. This is much harder to do.
I'd stick with always. Defense vs offense in anything reasonably complex suffers from one issue that simply cannot be overcome. To defend, you need to defend against every single possible imaginable attack, from now until forever. To attack, you need to find a single attack that works. And on a practical level all systems need to be accessible by somebody, yet that somebody is himself also now a part of your security structure and is never going to be 100% reliable, both in terms of corruption and incompetence.
> not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.
> And good security uses "defence in depth"
And automation has enabled "offense in depth"
> To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process.
Or you just phish the user into installing your exploit. There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit. Because ultimately the same properties of the universe which permit computation within a closed system allow for predictably observing and influencing it. The expense and hassle of doing so are widely variable, of course.
> There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit.
So what? Most attackers aren't nation state adversaries. They're some kid in Wyoming messing around with deepseek. We live in a world where most exploits happen because someone was running an unpatched, 8 year old copy of wordpress. Because they put their insecure mongodb instance on the open internet. Because they used admin / "12345" as the username and password. We don't need to make hacks physically impossible for a nation state adversary. Just really, really difficult and expensive to pull off.
Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.
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