It's a lot to take in. If you're now quietly wondering whether your hardware wallet might be less secure than you previously believed, that's a totally reasonable thought. But this article asks and answers a simple question: who, realistically, has the means and the motivation to execute a direct attack on a secure element?
The possibility of an attack is not the same as the risk of an attack. A burglar could theoretically cut through your front door with an angle grinder. That doesn't mean you should worry about it every time you leave the house.
What it takes to break a Secure Element
The most advanced direct attacks on secure elements documented in public research—laser fault injection and electromagnetic side-channel analysis—share a set of requirements that are rarely listed together. When you see them side by side, the full picture changes.
A well-equipped laboratory
Laser fault injection requires a laser fault injection station: a precision laser source, a microscope with micron-level positioning, a three-axis motorized stage, an oscilloscope, and associated control electronics. Commercial setups of this kind cost between $100,000 and $250,000. This equipment lives in a dedicated laboratory. It is not portable. It cannot be brought to your home.
Years of expertise
Before the laser is fired even once, the chip's plastic packaging must be removed using concentrated acid or precision milling equipment. The chip must then be mounted on a custom attack board under the microscope. This step alone takes hours and requires training in semiconductor handling.
Electromagnetic side-channel attacks are somewhat less invasive; the device can remain intact, but still requires a near-field EM probe positioned precisely on the chip's surface, a fast oscilloscope, and thousands of captured signing operations to perform offline statistical analysis. The full process takes hours of physical access and significant computational work after the fact.
Neither of these is something that happens opportunistically. These are planned, resourced, multi-day laboratory operations.
Months of preparation per chip family
Every attack documented in the research literature required months of development work specific to the target chip. An attack developed for one chip does not transfer to a different chip.
To attack your specific hardware wallet, an adversary doesn't just need the equipment. They need to have already done the chip-specific research, or be willing to invest months in doing it now.
Physical possession
Every direct physical attack on a secure element requires the attacker to have the device. And in the case of laser fault injection, the device is permanently altered: the chip packaging is gone.
There is no scenario in which someone borrows your hardware wallet for the afternoon, runs a laser fault injection attack on it, and returns it without you knowing something happened. If your hardware wallet is in your possession, it is not being laser fault injected. The attack cannot happen remotely, quickly, or invisibly.
Who can hack an SE
Who has the equipment, expertise, and motivation to do it, and would they target you?
1. Government intelligence agencies
National intelligence agencies have the laboratory infrastructure, budgets, and expertise to execute sophisticated hardware attacks, including direct secure-element analysis. These agencies have documented programs for intercepting hardware, implanting backdoors, and conducting physical analysis of cryptographic devices.
But intelligence agencies have targets. They don't conduct exploratory sweeps of everyone's hardware wallets. They investigate specific individuals. And if you are under that kind of investigation, thegovernment has tools far more efficient than laser fault injection at its disposal: legal compulsion to produce keys, seizure of assets through judicial process, and, in some jurisdictions, wrench attacks.
2. Specialized academic and commercial security labs
The research labs that have published the attacks described in this series—NinjaLab, Ledger Donjon, Fraunhofer AISEC, and university teams—have the capabilities to execute them. Their motivation is to advance the state of knowledge in hardware security, to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities to manufacturers, and to gain peer recognition within the security research community.
These teams are not financially motivated to steal your crypto. They are professionally motivated to find and disclose vulnerabilities so manufacturers can fix them.
3. Well-resourced criminal organizations
A serious criminal organization with access to semiconductor analysis equipment could, in principle, execute these attacks for financial gain. This would require knowing in advance that a specific individual holds enough cryptocurrency to justify the cost.
They would also need physical access to that individual's specific device for an extended period. And they would need to have already developed the chip-specific attack for that device's secure element.
This is not an impossible scenario for someone holding very significant crypto wealth, with poor physical security around their devices, and whose holdings are publicly known. For everyone else, the economics simply don't work.
Conclusion
Think about physical security for a moment. Your front door has a lock that can be defeated by a skilled locksmith, a bump key, or a drill. None of this means your home is insecure. It means the lock's job is to stop opportunistic intruders, and it does it so well.
A professional with specialized tools and a specific reason to get into your house is a different threat, one that no residential lock is designed to stop, and one that the vast majority of homeowners will never face.
A secure element works the same way. It is designed to stop the realistic threats that real users actually face: remote hackers who can't touch the chip, malware that runs on a connected computer, and opportunistic thieves who find a lost device. Against all of these, a certified secure element performs extremely well.
Against a government intelligence agency with a court order and a semiconductor lab, it is not designed to win, and it doesn't claim to.
Against a nation-state that has specifically decided you are a high-priority target, there are very few technological defenses that would help anyway.
