The Attack Cost Escalation Model: Why Physical Security Changes Adversary Economics

## Forcing Digital Supply-Chain Attacks Into the Physical World Introduction: Security Is Economics, Not Perfection Security architecture does not eliminate attacks. It reshapes the economics of attacking. Most modern supply-chain compromises succeed not because defenders are incompetent, but because the cost asymmetry favors attackers. Remote attacks are: Cheap Scalable Low-risk Difficult to attribute Defenders, meanwhile, must defend everything, all the time. This article introduces the Attack Cost Escalation Model: A design principle that forces attackers to cross trust domains — from digital to physical — making attacks expensive, risky, and non-scalable. The goal of security engineering is not theoretical unbreakability. It is economic deterrence at scale. The Baseline: Why Digital Attacks Dominate Modern CI/CD attacks succeed because they are: Cheap → stolen tokens, dependency poisoning, build-server malware Remote → attackers operate from anywhere Scalable → one compromise affec