How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-the-nintendo-switch-prevents-downgrades-by-irreparably-blowing-its-o
Downgrade prevention has been a cat-and-mouse game for nearly every consumer-grade product. The Nintendo Switch adopts a worrisome-strategy of preventing firmware downgrades by permanently modifying your device every time it updates.The Nintendo Switch was released on March 3, 2017, and is currently on version 5.0.2The Nintendo Switch use an Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, which comes with a fuse driver. This allows it to programmatically blow fuses — permanently modifying the device, making it impossible to revert to a previous state.How It WorksThe boot loader verifies a specific fuse, FUSE_RESERVED_ODM7, to prevent downgrading.[1] Each software version expects a different number of fuses to be blown — if more than is expected, it fails to boot, and if less, it’ll blow those fuses and then proceed to (...)
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