solrize , 1 month ago

I don’t think perfect invulnerability is possible: there are just higher and lower amounts of resistance, and of course there can be mistakes including in the protocols. The really high end stuff with tamper reactive packaging (e.g. used in banking) are usually installed in servers in secure data centers, with 24/7 CCTV coverage. So it would be very hard to mess with those things without at least being detected on the camera. The chips inside phones (Apple Secure Enclave, Google Titan) do receive a lot of attention to these issues.

Back around the 1990s there was sort of a technical arms race between set-top box manufactuers (the boxes authenticate to the networks with smart cards) vs cable TV pirates (they were willing to spend lots of money breaking cards, so they could sell illicit pirate cards to people). I think in the end, the card manufacturers “won” (made cards that the pirates couldn’t beat), but I don’t know if they have kept that advantage for all these years since then.