Imagine you’re an attacker staring at a billion-transistor system-on-chip (SoC). You don’t care whether the design boots Linux, passes simulation, or meets its performance targets. Your objective is far simpler. Find the one flaw nobody thought to look for.
It might be an undocumented debug port or path. Maybe it’s a configuration error between hardware and firmware. Sometimes it’s a perfectly legitimate sequence of operations that exposes sensitive information in a way the original team never anticipated. A single overlooked weakness is all it takes.