The most humbling part is, there’s always another level down. I thought programming code for the Linux kernel was low-level, until I worked on a team where there was an entire separate MCU on the same package underneath the primary cores running Linux that booted and controlled the whole system. I thought that was low-level until I worked for a team building a similar chip and had to participate in the design and validation efforts for it. There is almost always a whole world beneath the level of abstraction any of us operate on. Beneath the software world are IP blocks, which are composed of digital logic circuits, which are composed of transistors, which are governed (if you get small enough) by quantum effects… reaching the bottom is nearly impossible; it’s very humbling.

This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting properties of the physical hardware. Most industries choose to ignore these problems, because they’re very expensive to mitigate.