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Code Running on Living Metal When Hardware Stops Playing by the Rules
Software engineers love to believe their code runs in a clean, deterministic universe. But once you drop below the OS layer and step onto bare metal, that illusion collapses. Microcontrollers, avionics systems, and industrial controllers operate inside physics not logic and physics doesn’t care about your abstractions. 1. Hardware Is Not a Perfect Machine…
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When Cryptography Depends on Noise, Not Data: The Hidden Risk in Quantum-Safe Systems
Quantum-safe cryptography is often promoted as the long-term shield against quantum attacks, but a critical blind spot is rarely discussed: some of these schemes fundamentally rely on noise and noise is a physical phenomenon, not a mathematical one.Once your security depends on unpredictable errors, anyone who can control those errors can start bending the…
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Cache Side-Channel Attacks: When Time Itself Becomes a Leak
Modern computing systems rely on multilayered memory hierarchies designed for speed, not secrecy. CPU caches — L1, L2, L3 — exist to accelerate access to frequently used data. But that optimization introduces a blind spot: timing differences. Attackers can observe tiny delays in memory access and extract information that should never be accessible. No…
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Side-Channel Attacks on Mobile and IoT what they are, why they matter, and how to defend against them
Side-channel attacks are the ugly truth most developers don’t want to face: they extract secrets without breaking crypto math or getting privileged access — by observing physical or microarchitectural side effects (timing, power consumption, EM emissions, cache behavior, sensors, etc.). On constrained devices like phones and IoT nodes this problem is worse because hardware…
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Hardware-Level Cryptography with Intel SGX: Securing the Untrusted World
Introduction In a world where malware, rootkits, and insider threats constantly evolve, traditional software-based security is no longer enough. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) takes a different path — embedding cryptographic isolation directly into the processor. By creating a trusted execution environment (TEE) within the CPU, SGX allows sensitive code and data to run…