Definition
Plain language
Software that has had extra protections switched on to make it harder to break.
As stated in the literature
A build or deployment with security mitigations enabled — sandboxing, exploit mitigations, reduced privileges, stripped debug surfaces — making vulnerability discovery and exploitation substantially harder than against a default build.
Also called: hardening, hardened build
Why it matters: Whether an attack works on a hardened production build rather than a bare research build is the difference between an interesting demo and a real threat.
For example, a browser shipped to the public runs each web page in a locked-down sandbox, so a bug in page rendering does not automatically hand over the whole computer.
Heard on the show
“And the second hardening?”Episode 004 — The Sycophancy Circuit That Survives Alignment Training