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Comment by no_time | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue the same goes for L1 and L2. But the obscurity is provided by the silicon packaging process.

Would be nice to crowdfund a lab to break these hardware backed treachery schemes.

When you say “security through obscurity” there’s a certain understanding that we’re drawing a line between implementation secrecy (obscurity / obfuscation) and key secrecy. If we extend the word “obscurity” to include the notion of physical security, I think we’ve gone too far—even if physical security is just the physical security of a secret embedded in silicon that you have physical access to (because it is super difficult to recover secrets from silicon).

With DRM the user who owns the machine is the "attacker". The keys have already been handed to the user, he only needs to get them out. This is like hiding an API key in a public website's javascript with rot13. Very much security by obscurity.

Proper security means that the attacker should never be in possession of the key.

You’re saying that a hardware security module is like rot13?

When you say the attacker “only” needs to get them out, the “only” is doing a lot of work, there.

Yes, but it only has to be done once.

The standard for cryptographic security is that the attacker can do no better than brute force. And the complexity for that is usually set high enough that it is out of range for the entire computational capacity of our civilization for years to come.

I'd say handing the key to the attacker in a package that requires somewhere between a skilled reverse-engineer and a semiconductor lab to untangle falls far short of that standard.

While cracking the hardware is an interesting technical challenge, it is certainly not the only method. Security is only as good as the weakest link -- the human factor. Thus, piracy groups are able to use social engineering to crack Widevine without relying on advanced laboratories. See [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702110

The same goes for the HSMs that power the internet's certificate authorities then. If there were a precise enough CT scan that could read the current state of atoms and flash, we'd have a major security problem.

The only reason L1 doesn't prevent people from pirating 4K HDR movies is because the Nvidia Shield has a bypass, and Google is too afraid to revoke its keys (or maybe Nvidia is paying millions of dollars a year to rights holders for their 'lost sales' from pirated movies at the hands of the Nvidia Shield).

Ah the Tegra X1 bootrom exploit is the gift that just keeps on giving. I instantly bought a switch when the news came out.

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