There is nothing that is safe against physical attacks practically. You can always find a point where you can do a MITM attack as the communication channels between the TPM and anything else is almost always insecure.
>There is nothing that is safe against physical attacks practically.
This! If security is your prime directive in your line of work(government, highly sensitive data, etc), then as long as your device has been outside your physical possession and in the hands of an untrusted third party, then it's automatically considered compromised and gets wiped or discarded by your IT department.
Because no amount of marketing security fluff from Microsoft, Apple, Google can stand against targeted attacks of state actors or knowledgeable motivated well funded actors with freshly acquired zero days.
The security they provide is only good enough against the average thief off the street, which I guess covers 98% of Average Joe's threats.
Even CC security certifications never judge a device whether it's hackable or not, but only on how long it takes for it to be hacked by an accredited lab, because nothing with outside physical access is ever unbackable. With enough time and six figure equipment off the publicly available commercial market, everything reveals its secrets eventually. And that's without zero days off the black market.
> only good enough against the average thief off the street,
Even there, only Apple has effective protection against street-thieves. Nearly all other models of phones/laptops can have their anti-theft features reset by a guy in a dark alley with a flash programmer...
So far, most thieves aren't interested in your info, they just want to reset the hardware and give it a new serial number.
Most other makes of phones and laptops aren't as valuable as Apple's to be big targets of theft. And Samsung has KNOX and Pixels have Google's Titan security.
Also, physical security is sometimes the best thing because it maps well to all of our human intuitions and senses for enforcing it and detecting when it was violated.
Consider how different a wireless hacking attack is from one where somebody has to sneak up and stab your device with an RJ-45 plug.
I use to work in Microsoft DRM. I used to say: the key is on the machine! This is like leaving your house key under a rock in the garden. It just puts up a barrier of a certain level which puts off most villains.
Sure, but there are many shades of gray. Directly leaking the entire key on an external bus is very different than needing to find and somehow bond to individual traces (likely below the top metal layer) on the die itself.
Only a sith deals in absolutes (jk). Even with physical access, you can define restrictions that introduce some level of difficulty for a threat actor with limited capability. For example, you can just kick in most house doors to get past locks, but people still lock their doors. Cars are a better example, most car theft happens when people leave their doors unlocked.
This! If security is your prime directive in your line of work(government, highly sensitive data, etc), then as long as your device has been outside your physical possession and in the hands of an untrusted third party, then it's automatically considered compromised and gets wiped or discarded by your IT department.
Because no amount of marketing security fluff from Microsoft, Apple, Google can stand against targeted attacks of state actors or knowledgeable motivated well funded actors with freshly acquired zero days.
The security they provide is only good enough against the average thief off the street, which I guess covers 98% of Average Joe's threats.
Even CC security certifications never judge a device whether it's hackable or not, but only on how long it takes for it to be hacked by an accredited lab, because nothing with outside physical access is ever unbackable. With enough time and six figure equipment off the publicly available commercial market, everything reveals its secrets eventually. And that's without zero days off the black market.