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> Many security applications, situations where you're providing equipment to others and want to make sure it's not modified, etc. It's not that hard to come up with legitimate uses for this.

Why isn't just making sure the expected private key didn't get wiped a good enough way of making sure it's not modified?

> You should at the least demonstrate that their existence is causing great societal harm.

Okay, how about that it destroys the secondhand CPU market? Once you use an AMD CPU in a Lenovo computer, it blows e-fuses to keep you from ever using it in any other brand of computer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29958247



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> Why isn't just making sure the expected private key didn't get wiped a good enough way of making sure it's not modified?

What's to stop someone from extracting and restoring the private key?

> Okay, how about that it destroys the secondhand CPU market?

Sure, then how about addressing that issue rather than proposing to outlaw an entire mechanism entirely? We have a lot of things that can be misused, but (generally) only in extreme cases do we outlaw the tech itself. More usually, we have laws targeting the misuse of the tech.


> What's to stop someone from extracting and restoring the private key?

Isn't the whole point of these chips that you can't extract the private key, so that if it gets wiped, it's definitely gone forever?

> Sure, then how about addressing that issue rather than proposing to outlaw an entire mechanism entirely? We have a lot of things that can be misused, but (generally) only in extreme cases do we outlaw the tech itself. More usually, we have laws targeting the misuse of the tech.

But this particular technology doesn't seem to have any legitimate uses.


> Isn't the whole point of these chips that you can't extract the private key, so that if it gets wiped, it's definitely gone forever?

I don't think these chips include TPM. But if that's the case, wouldn't you object to that on the same grounds that you object to efuses?

> But this particular technology doesn't seem to have any legitimate uses.

Myself and at least one other commenter has mentioned a few legitimate uses.


> I don't think these chips include TPM. But if that's the case, wouldn't you object to that on the same grounds that you object to efuses?

No, because it would let you generate a new key instead of remaining keyless forever.


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