Cryptography amounts to not much if your software and hardware is full of backdoors...
Crypto keeps the playing field level. Unless you go full-blown conspiracy-theory-mode, most software suffers from unintended
vulnerabilities rather than outright
backdoors. These get patched, new ones are introduced/discovered and attack vectors need ro be reworked,
while still bypassing as much crypto as possible. If you suddenly broke integer factorization, or some popular hash functions etc., this step goes away and you can dispense with hacking devices and just grab all the traffic/physical data from your target. Then privacy is truly gone and buried.
Hardware backdoors are still mostly a proof-of-concept thing, and largely restricted to operations involving nation-states when they’re not. Fiddling with physical objects is difficult and expensive, compared to software.
It doesn't take the resources of a nation-state to use these
But it does to
develop them, or at least close enough. And I was more referring to the fact that a nation-state can supplement remote hacking with a lot more, in terms of techniques, tools, physical access and legal authority.
and software is easy to copy.
Yes, and that's the lesson from the crypto wars of the 90s the US government is hell-bent on unlearning.
Banks have always had a strangely relaxed stance regarding cybersecurity, for that matter.
However, not so long ago my friend's computer got hacked.
I'm curious, do you mean someone deliberately hijacked/infected his computer
in particular?
