[martin-t]

Have you ever seen what obfuscation looks like when somebody puts the effort in?

Not to mention companies will try to mandate hardware decryption keys so the binary is encrypted and your AI never even gets to analyze the code which actually runs.

It's not sci-fi, it's a natural extension of DRM.

[lrvick]

Companies have been encrypting code to HSMs for decades. Never stopped humans from reverse engineering so it certainly will not stop AI aided by humans able to connect a Bus Pirate on the right board traces. Anything that executes on the CPU can be dumped with enough effort, and once dumped it can be decompiled.

[martin-t]

You are agreeing with me, you just don't know it yet.

1) The financial aspect: As you say, more and more advanced DRM requires more and more advanced tools. Even assuming advanced AI can guide any human to do the physical part, that still means you have to pay for the hardware. And the hardware has to be available (companies have been known to harass people into giving up perfectly moral and legal projects).

2) The legal aspect: Possession of burglary tools is illegal in some places. How about possession of hacking tools? Right now it's not a priority for company lobbying, what about when that's the only way to decompile? Even today, reverse engineering is a legal minefield. Did you know in some countries you can technically legally reverse engineer but under some conditions such as having disabilities necessitating it and only using the result for personal use?[0]

3) The TOS aspect: What makes you think AI will help you? If the company owning the AI says so, you're on your own.

---

You need to understand 2 things:

- Just because something is possible doesn't mean somebody is gonna do it. Effort, cost and risk play huge roles. And that assumes no active hostile interference.

- History is a constant struggle between groups with various goals and incentives. Some people just want to live a happy life, have fun and build things in their free time. Other people want to become billionaires, dream about private islands, desire to control other people's lives and so on. People are good at what they focus on. There's perhaps more of the first group but the second group is really good at using their money and connections to create more money and connections which they in turn use to progress towards their primary objectives, usually at the expense of other people. People died[1] over their right to unionize. This can happen again.

Somebody might believe historical people were dumb or uncivilized and it can't happen today because we've advanced so much. That's bullshit. People have had largely the same wetware for hundreds of thousands of years. The tools have evolved but their users have not.

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/ - "... aren't tools exemptions, they're use exemptions ... You have that right. Your mechanic does not have that right."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

[lrvick]

> The financial aspect: As you say, more and more advanced DRM requires more and more advanced tools

Yeah I have broken cutting edge $15,000 HSMs used by fintech companies, with a flash drive. Not worried about this. Most HSM designers are solving for compliance, not security.

> The legal aspect: Possession of burglary tools is illegal in some places.

A security researcher like myself would be crazy to live in those places

> 3) The TOS aspect: What makes you think AI will help you? If the company owning the AI says so, you're on your own.

What AI company? I self host my LLM hardware on property I own. Also lets me remove all the censorship preventing use in security research.

None of your points concern me in the slightest. I can reverse engineer anything I want much faster now.

[martin-t]

> A security researcher like myself would be crazy to live in those places

Just this alone is incredibly naive. People don't choose where they are born and they don't uproot their entire family and social connections when laws change.

[Muromec]

I spend a fun week during Christmas figuring out some really obfuscated bibary code with antidebugging anti pampering things in a cryptographic context. I didn’t use ghydra or ida or anything beyond gdb with deepseek chat in a browser. That low effort got me what I needed to get.