There will always be an arms race between safe-crackers and safe-builders.

This is dismissive and glib. And it's the wrong lesson.

You wouldn't say this about symmetric cryptography. AES-encrypted ciphertexts from 25 years ago are still secure today, and nothing on the horizon is likely to change that. No arms race.

The "arms race" exists because the security model for trusted hardware is intrinsically flawed. If the attacker has physical posession of the device, your security is transient and at the mercy of the arms race. So stop doing this! Trusted hardware also has extremely negative externalities on the whole computing ecosystem.

(*) or 45 years, if you exclude cryptosystems (56bit single-DES) used only because of silly export laws.

> This is dismissive and glib.

As is your comment.

> And it's the wrong lesson.

It's only the wrong lesson if you believe that making it more difficult for governments to seize and decrypt their own citizens' mobile phones with impunity is not a valid goal.

> the security model for trusted hardware is intrinsically flawed.

It's only intrinsically flawed if you expect absolute perfection.

The fact that some math-based protections may be theoretically better than physical protections does not obviate the utility of physical protections, whether we are discussing computers or phones, or houses or cars.

It has been accepted since before any of us were born that there is no such thing as perfect physical security. Even your putative perfect cryptographic security still relies on the physical security of the plant holding the keys.