[lostnet]

Groups brokering exploits is definitely scary stuff. But the non-privatized government researchers have existed long before them and are better at keeping silent and therefore largely perpetual exploits.

Under it all, the current model remains a by obscurity model, where anyone with orders of more magnitude of resources can certainly do enough reverse engineering to find the weak links and break in without planting backdoors.

Vendors reaching the point where they can offer bounties without contemplating bankruptcy implies considerably more resources are going into secure by design software and will continue to flow if they plan to remain solvent and unembarrassed (equally emabarassed?)

I've been playing with a chromebook and I am delighted to see frivolous and even fairly significant features were dropped to develop a secure boot model with a reasonable opt out. I'm sure it will still be broken, but 5-10 years ago it would have been trivially breakable to meet some last minute corporate request for tftp booting, marketing demo, or what have you..

Similar to the drug market, you can not drop the open market and expect everything to stop. Instead you must capture as many resources as you can and direct them to the right goal. I would hope that goal is secure kernels that expand out towards today's features, since the opposite clearly does not work with the resources at hand.