Posted by validatori 1 day ago
But to answer your question: we know iPhones have a foolproof kill switch, it's a feature. Just mark your device as lost in Find My and it'll be locked until someone can provide your login details. Assuming it requires logging in to your Apple account (which it does, AFAIK; I don't think logging in to a local account is enough), this is the same as a remote kill switch; Apple could simply make a device enter this locked-down state and then tweak their server systems to deny logins.
Realize that many of these manufacturers sell their hardware in and employ companies in highly policed societies. Just the fact that they are allowed to continue to operate implies that they are playing ball and may well have to perform a couple of favors. And that's assuming they are fully aware of what they are shipping, which may not be always the case.
I don't think it is a bad model at all to consider any cell phone to be compromised in multiple ways even though you don't have hard proof.
Millions of fully working apple devices are destroyed because of that even - Apple won't unlock them even with proof of ownership.
Pre-prod (etc.) devices will also have different fuses burnt.
Using eFuses is a popular way of implementing downgrade prevention, but also for permanently disabling debug flags/interfaces in production hardware.
Some vendors (AMD) also use eFuses to permanently bond a CPU to a specific motherboard (think EPYC chips for certain enterprise vendors).
At the moment they're 'older' and would class as a rollback, which this fuse prevents.
Storing it in the firmware would mean every user has the same key. Storing it in eeprom means a factory reset will clear it. This allows me to ship hardware with the default key on a sticker on the side, and let's a non technical user reset it back to that if they need to.
It gives you a 256bit block to work with - https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...
They are no different than some shit ransomware, except there is no demand for money. However, there is a demonstrable proof of degradation and destruction of property in all these choices.
Frankly, criminal AND civil penalties should be levied. Criminally, the C levels and boars of directors should all be in scope as to encouraging/allowing/requiring this behavior. RICO act as well, since this smells like a criminal conspiracy. Let them spend time in prison for mass destruction of property.
Civally, start dissolving assets until the people are made whole with unbroken (and un-destroyed) hardware.
The next shitty silly-con valley company thinks about running this scam of 'customer-bought but forever company owned', will think long and hard about the choices of their network and cloud.
There is when the device becomes hard bricked and triggers an unnecessary need for a new one.
Now I have to consider my device dead re updates, because if I haven't already gotten the killing update I'd rather avoid it. First thing I did was unlock the bootloader, and I intend to root/flash it at some point. Will be finding another brand whenever I'm ready to upgrade again.