>No, they aren't. The NSA can't just waltz into Apple and break into their HSM to steal their keys The NSA could waltz into the plant manufacturing the HSM. Or

>No, they aren't. The NSA can't just waltz into Apple and break into their HSM to steal their keys The NSA could waltz into the plant manufacturing the HSM. Or they could waltz into Apple and make sure Apple uses the right HSM with keys already known to the NSA, e.g. by replacing the shipment of the HSMs Apple ordered. (This would require the NSA knowing in advance when Apple buys HSMs for what purpose and from what vendor, but again, intelligence gathering business). >These systems are designed to be robust even against physical access attacks. They are designed by humans trying to make those things "robust" against attacks. "Robust" is a "best effort" word. Assuming that the thing that got shipped to you actually is the thing you think and not just some nice NSA chip with the name of a popular HSM vendor printed on top. You cannot really open up the chip and look inside as, if this is a properly designed HSM, this it is supposed to be destro if you tamper with the enclosure or any other vital parts of it. I'd be surprised if the NSA does not spend resources on research into breaking HSMs, and if it do esnot spend resources on designing "fakes". The level of their success is unknown until the next Snowden shows up. But if they did break some HSMs, they wouldn't be alone [0]. So, there is a chance the NSA can waltz into Apple and break into their HSM and steal their keys. This assumes Apple uses HSMs for this kind of stuff and uses them correctly. Since authorized third-party repair shops can replace components and repair the hardware with some help from Apple, as I said before, it's not even necessary to compromise Apple or their HSMs, it's sufficient to compromise those repair shops, whether third party of have a few NSA Geniuses around. But either swapping out HSMs pre-installation or breaking ones with design flaws is certainly in the realm of possibility too. >The Snowden leaks gave us a very good idea about what the NSA does. No, Snowden showed what they did in 2013 and before, because that's when he went public. Snowden does not know what they did 2014, let alone what they are doing now in 2021. That's about 8 years of most recent NSA R&D that we do not know about. >Backdoor products in transit. HSM is a "product", last I heard ;) >These are all practical, reasonable things that are a far cry from the magical abilities people like to ascribe to them. Magical? Nothing magical in what I said I believe the NSA could reasonably achieve. We're talking about abusing design flaws in HSMs and/or supply chain attacks not creating "a GUI interface using VisualBasic to track the killers IP address". [0] https://cryptosense.com/blog/how-ledger-hacked-an-hsm https://cryptosense.com/blog/how-ledger-hacked-an-hsm