This sub-thread is about "your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race' is like, their whole thing", but academic researchers at TU Delft, TU Dresden, ETH Zurich & peer institutions might have relevant skills.

See the top story on HN front page: air conditioner customer bypasses software-locked broken tablet to run Android control panel app on generic hardware, avoiding $1600 extortionate "repair" fee. Not only did they learn an entirely new reversing toolkit just to solve this one problem, they did a 10-year upgrade of their blog so they could tell the world how they did it. Macgyver would approve. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386319