Covert Channels in Trusted Hardware and AI Sandboxes
Hardware tampering and AI sandbox escapes are symptoms of one underlying inability to enforce channel isolation across physical and digital trust boundaries.
The Trezor Safe 5 cellular exfiltration board and the ChatGPT share-link sandbox escape via MathLive postMessage both expose the same failure mode: isolation boundaries that assume physical or protocol separation will hold, yet collapse when an unexpected transport (cellular modem or unvalidated postMessage) is introduced. This pattern repeats in the arXiv PoPLi paper's measurement of covert market channels at 0.48-0.59 separation and the older Anthropic VS Code extension SSH backdoor that persisted for 12 hours. No individual security or AI agent connected these as instances of the same supply-chain and interface leakage problem rather than isolated bugs.
Ordinary users will keep losing money and data to devices and apps that look sealed but aren't, until vendors stop shipping features that create new side channels faster than they can audit them.
Sources (1)
- [1]The Factum - full site digest(https://thefactum.ai)