LABScon26 Replay | Let’s Get Physical: Why Cybersecurity Needs Hardware-Based Security to Survive AI
Adyen’s Dino Dai Zovi shows how hardware security proven in payments can contain AI-driven attacks, even when vulnerabilities cannot be patched.
In his LABScon 26 keynote, Dino Dai Zovi, SVP and Head of Security at Adyen, argues that defenders can’t keep pace with AI-enabled attackers through software alone. He makes the case that the hardware-based security already protecting everyday payments can close that gap.
Using tap-to-pay as an example, Dai Zovi notes how a secure element in a smartphone completes a transaction that malware on the device cannot touch. At the same time, data from the UK’s AI Security Institute on autonomous cyber capability shows end-to-end intrusions that once took days or months are now approaching minutes, with open-weight models only months behind frontier models.
Arguing that the main risk from AI is not AI agents turning on humanity but humans using AI to achieve malicious goals, Dai Zovi proposes engineering for resilience using hardware-based controls. He draws on analogies with bank vaults and nuclear weapon safety principles to show how hardware controls have long contained risks that would otherwise depend on people or software behaving correctly. He then works through an AI cyber range on the assumption that none of its vulnerabilities can be patched, and shows how a handful of hardware boundaries leave an agent with nothing useful to take.
He closes with a question. If the technology to contain AI already runs at scale in systems used many times a day, should we choose to apply it?
This presentation is essential viewing for security engineers, architects and leaders thinking about how to defend against AI-accelerated attacks.
About the Author
Dino Dai Zovi is SVP and Head of Security at Adyen. He previously served as Head of Applied Security Engineering at Block, where he led security for Cash App and for Square’s expansion into EMV card payments, including the work that inspired the PCI SPoC mobile PIN entry standard. He is best known for winning the first Pwn2Own contest in 2007, co-authoring “The iOS Hacker’s Handbook” and “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook,” and co-founding Trail of Bits, Capsule8 and the Pwnie Awards.
About LABScon
This presentation was featured live at LABScon 2026, an immersive 3-day conference bringing together the world’s top cybersecurity minds, hosted by SentinelOne’s research arm, SentinelLABS.
Keep up with all the latest on LABScon here.
