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timschmidtyesterday at 10:30 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


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josephgtoday at 12:36 AM

> 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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