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hypeateiyesterday at 9:21 PM4 repliesview on HN

It's my first time hearing about this "eFuse" functionality in Qualcomm CPUs. Are there non-dystopian uses for this as a manufacturer?


Replies

hexagonwinyesterday at 9:26 PM

Samsung uses this for their Knox security feature. The fuse gets broken in initial bootloader unlock, and all features related to Knox (Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, etc) gets disabled permanently even after reverting to stock firmware.

josephcsibleyesterday at 11:17 PM

There are not. The entire premise of eFuses are that after you buy something, the manufacturer can still make changes that you can't ever undo.

thesh4d0wyesterday at 9:30 PM

I use them in an esp32 to write a random password to each of my products, so when I sell them they can each have their own secure default wifi password while all using the same firmware.

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Retr0idyesterday at 9:24 PM

eFuses are in most CPUs, often used for things like disabling hardware debug interfaces in production devices - and rollback prevention.