"This happened in the early 1990s, when I was a young engineer starting an internship at one of the companies that helped create the smart card industry. I believed my card was secure. I believed the system worked. But watching strangers casually extract something that was supposed to be secret and protected was a shock. It was also the moment I realized how insecure security actually is, and the devastating impact security breaches could have on individuals, global enterprises, and governments."
"In reality, security is about understanding exactly how something breaks, under what conditions, and how quickly. That is why, today, I run labs where engineers are paid to attack the very chips my company designs. They measure power fluctuations, inject electromagnetic signals, fire lasers, and strip away layers of silicon. Their job is to behave like criminals and hostile nation-states on purpose, because the only honest way to build trust is to try to destroy it first."
An early 1990s security-lab exercise exposed a smart card PIN in under ten minutes, demonstrating unexpected vulnerability in payment hardware. The incident revealed that security is not about unbreakable design but about knowing how, when, and how quickly systems fail. Engineers intentionally attack chips—measuring power fluctuations, injecting electromagnetic signals, firing lasers, and removing silicon layers—to emulate criminals and hostile states. Such adversarial testing identifies real-world failure modes and builds reliable trust. Untested trust is described as assumption that can fail silently and catastrophically. Over three decades, secure chips evolved into invisible infrastructure, with early efforts focused on convincing banks that chips were safer than magnetic stripes.
Read at Fortune
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