Re:Yubico: Secure Hardware vs. Open Source
by makomk on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @08:04AM
(#11712859)
Pretty much all of the providers of secure hardware are like this because they're all reliant on security by obscurity. They rely on keeping secret things like their instruction set, register locations, what countermeasures against intrusion they have, etc in order to make it harder for a hacker to compromise them.
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> in order to make it harder for a hacker to compromise them
Keeping implementation details secret DOES make it harder for a hacker to compromise them. When used as a defence on top of a decent security infrastructure. "Security through obscurity" is when a company only uses the secrecy as a defence. This is not true:
> they're all reliant on security by obscurity
They're generally reliant on some secure and proven methods of security, with a layer of design obscurity over the top (and in practice as others have pointed out, they don't keep the design secret for security reasons, they do it for commercial ones).