Nothing Is Too Hidden to Hack
In William Gibson's definitive cyberpunk short story, "Burning Chrome," the narrator is a hardware hacker called Automatic Jack. As the story begins, Jack describes the attack console used by his partner: "I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the 'Cyberspace Seven,' but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon."

I've always thought that sentence a pardonable piece of literary license: After all, Gibson famously wrote his groundbreaking stories on a manual typewriter. I had to rethink that characterization, though, after reading MIT doctoral candidate Andrew Huang's account of his attack on the hardware security of Microsoft's Xbox.

Huang's disclosures convey implicit messages that have to be understood by anyone involved in developing or deploying IT.

First, there's no such thing as security based on obscurity or inconvenience. Someone, somewhere, will dig deep enough to figure out what you've done and how—either for financial gain, or just for the sake of curiosity.

Second, there's no "technology floor" below which it becomes intrinsically safe to send valuable information in unencrypted forms. Even at a microscopic level, formal protocols at some point turn into actual volts and amperes: Anything that "friendly" hardware can process as bits, invasive hardware can analyze as intercepted signals that an attacker can then deconstruct.
http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=706&a=27900,00.asp