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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> your security structure and is never going to be 100% reliable

So what? Security systems don't need to be 100% provably secure to add value. It's a mistake to let perfect be the enemy of good.

> 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.

> 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.

The saying is that locks only keep honest people honest. Plenty of evidence of that: https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer

Sure, but also if there are a dozen bikes locked to the rack all costing $1000 and a $500 bike just sitting there completely unlocked, the average thief is probably gonna take the cheaper unlocked one and ride away.

It’s not hard to get into a garage but it’s really easy to steal a lawnmower if you leave the door open all night. I wouldn’t call that thief honest but even the minor deterrent of closing the garage was enough to make you not the target.

> The saying is that locks only keep honest people honest. Plenty of evidence of that: https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer

That youtube channel is great. But it isn't evidence of anything. Except maybe for how terrible master locks are.

How many locked doors have easily breakable glass windows right next to them, nevermind breakable walls? What we need is a red-team waiver, and an AI model, and a budget, and say something like: your site has to be unhacked by the HackerAI3000 bot after 2 days on a 5090 Nvidia GPU.

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