Make blowing eFuses in devices illegal. The device no longer belongs to the manufacturer and they should have no power to physically damage it, nor to compel me to allow them to physically damage it as a condition for use.
EFuses enable awful anti-consumer "features" like preventing firmware downgrades, blacklisting compromised cryptographic keys, and bricking devices remotely.
Do you mean before or after manufacturing? Afterwards, I agree. Before, no way: that's how most modern CPUs work. They put a bunch of crap on the chip and make them all the same way, but due to defects, different chips have different parts that don't work, so they blow efuses inside the chip to disable the broken parts, and then sell the chip as the variant that doesn't include that function.
IDK. I'd kind of like it if manufacturers would stop selling me V-12-shaped engines that can only be run as inline-4s, too.
(No, that's not a thing.
But I'm not sure what qualitative differences might exist, and which would actually survive debate, betwixt a fully-built silicon chip with parts disabled forever and a fully-built engine assembly with parts disabled forever.)
After the sale-- that's why I qualified who the device belongs to in my post. Before the sale it belongs to the manufacturer and they can do whatever they want to it.
They also enable things like resettable fuses in a car (ie Tesla) such that you don't need to have some dumb fuse in the fusebox blow and then waste money/time buying replacements. Instead make them software resettable after a fault has been resolved and now you have eliminated a cost and made the system more efficient.
I don't think we're talking about the same kind of eFuses. The ones I'm talking about don't serve a current-limiting function like a traditional fuse. They're features on chips to allow for non-volatile storage of a limited number of bits that, once blown, cannot be reset.
Yes I know about eFuses, they were used on the Xbox 360 console as well. As far as I know, they are similar types of eFuses on the Tesla that are capable of changing their state via firmware instead of one time blow (different application) but I could be wrong. Its just in this case the thing being controlled is not a checksum for what firmware can be installed, but a checksum to confirm if current should flow to a specific path.
EFuses enable awful anti-consumer "features" like preventing firmware downgrades, blacklisting compromised cryptographic keys, and bricking devices remotely.