The patterns of hardware security crystallize in a few well-documented public cases. Brief tour:
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Mifare Classic crack (2008). Karsten Nohl decaps the chip, optically reverse-engineers the proprietary CRYPTO1 cipher, finds it weak, publishes attacks. Transit cards across Europe needed replacement. The case study that taught the world to never trust security through obscurity in silicon.
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Sony PS3 ECDSA failure (2010). fail0verflow at 27C3 reveals Sony reused the random nonce in their console-signing ECDSA. The signing key falls out of two known signatures via a couple of GCDs. PS3 jailbroken permanently.
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Xbox 360 reset glitch (2011). GliGli applies a brief reset pulse to the Xenon CPU during hypervisor signature comparison; the comparison flag latches incorrectly; unsigned code runs. The console line opens.
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iPhone 5c vs. 5s and FBI vs. Apple (2016). The 5c (no SEP) has FBI-funded brute force. The 5s+ (with SEP) does not, because the SEP rate-limits PIN attempts in silicon. The case becomes a national debate about hardware-enforced rights.
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Tesla Model S key fob clone (2016). Wouters et al. at KU Leuven extract the symmetric key from a Pektron key-fob via 13.56 MHz interaction in seconds, clone the fob, drive away. Tesla patches via OTA but the underlying weakness was the use of a 40-bit DST40 cipher.
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Spectre and Meltdown (January 2018). Three independent groups disclose. Operating systems, hypervisors, and microcode update across the entire industry inside six months. The class of attack defines a decade of CPU design.
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Rowhammer line of work (2014-present). From the original paper through Drammer, Throwhammer, ECCploit, Half-Double, Blacksmith. Continuous reminder that DRAM physics is a battle.
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PlayStation jailbreaks across generations (PSP, PS Vita, PS4, PS5). Each console's break tells a different story: bootloader exploits, USB-stack bugs in mask ROMs, kernel race conditions exploited from WebKit. Console security at-large has matured from "trivially broken" to "requires nation-state-grade effort", which is a quiet win for hardware-enforcement.