> Also also, I hope other popular cryptoprocessors aren't so vulnerable?
You might be surprised, but also this chip wasn't intended to be used to secure a chain of trust but had to be press ganged into service after being let down by the main bootrom, which was done by a team at NVidia without much experience of doing these things and made a lot of elementary errors. And being used for a games console is painting a big target on your back.
But ultimately a lot of secure chipset areas have been subject to a lot of... learning on the job shall we say. Things are much better than they used to be, but you don't have to go back many years before things get very hairy. People constantly say they want more OS version support for Android, but I would not want to use a five year old processor from Samsung or Qualcomm if I cared about the hardware backed security on my phone.
> but you don't have to go back many years before things get very hairy
For the NV TSEC-equivalent Falcon successor on Ampere, it’s indeed not vulnerable to this attack because that security subsystem was made much more secure.
> People constantly say they want more OS version support for Android, but I would not want to use a five year old processor from Samsung or Qualcomm if I cared about the hardware backed security on my phone.
What I would really like is a modern Android that doesn't brick half the security features by e-fuse when I root it and many apps refuse to run properly afterwards - why the fuck, for example, does the PayPal app refuse fingerprint unlocking after rooting but other apps don't?! All this incentivizes me as the user is to choose an insecure password that I can actually remember.
I'm fairly certain you're not eFused out, but you would have to give up your root and let your phone powerwash itself if you wanted things to go back to normal.
You might be surprised, but also this chip wasn't intended to be used to secure a chain of trust but had to be press ganged into service after being let down by the main bootrom, which was done by a team at NVidia without much experience of doing these things and made a lot of elementary errors. And being used for a games console is painting a big target on your back.
But ultimately a lot of secure chipset areas have been subject to a lot of... learning on the job shall we say. Things are much better than they used to be, but you don't have to go back many years before things get very hairy. People constantly say they want more OS version support for Android, but I would not want to use a five year old processor from Samsung or Qualcomm if I cared about the hardware backed security on my phone.