The Illusion of security: Why Breaking Things Builds trust

The first time I handed over my credit card to a security lab, it came back to me broken. Not physically damaged, but compromised. In less than 10 minutes, the engineers had discovered my PIN.

A Rude Awakening

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.

Security is About Failure

Most people assume security is about building something that’s unbreakable.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.

The Value of Testing

To someone outside the security world, this approach sounds counterintuitive. Why spend years designing secure hardware, only to invite people to tear it apart? The answer is straightforward: Trust that has never been tested is not trust. It is assumption. Assumptions fail quietly at first, and they fail at the worst possible moment.

From Payment Cards to Digital Passports

over the past three decades, I have watched secure chips move from a specialized technology into invisible infrastructure. Early in my career, much of my work focused on payment cards. Convincing banks and payment networks that a chip was safer than a magnetic stripe was not easy. At the time,there were fears about surveillance and tracking.What few people recognized was that these chips were becoming digital passports. They prove identity,authenticate devices,and determine what could and could not be trusted on a network.

Key Takeaways

• security isn’t about creating something unbreakable, but understanding its breaking points.
• Testing security through deliberate attacks is crucial for building genuine trust.
• Assumptions about security are dangerous and will inevitably fail.
• Secure chips have evolved from payment tools to essential components of digital identity and trust.