Motorola responds to Droid X bootloader controversy, says eFuse isn't there to break the phone

There's been a lot of chatter going around the interwebs in the past 24 hours about the Droid X's exceptionally well-locked bootloader -- a situation that is going to make running custom ROMs considerably more difficult (bordering on impossible) compared to your average HTC. Specifically, the culprit is said to be a technology known as eFuse -- developed by IBM several years ago -- which allows circuits to be physically altered at the silicon level on demand. Thing is, the term "eFuse" has taken on an unrelated meaning this week, with My Droid World claiming that some chip inside the Droid X is commanded to "blow the fuse" if it's unable to verify the stock bootloader, which permanently bricks the phone. It amounts to a really, really hard slap on the wrist for anyone trying to hack, say, Sense or stock Froyo onto it.

Considering IBM's historically non-nefarious usage of the term "eFuse," we suspected something was amiss here, so we reached out to Motorola for an explanation. Read on to see what we got back.

"Motorola's primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements. The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader. In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats. Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at http://developer.motorola.com."

So in other words, yes, eFuse will shut down a phone with an unapproved bootloader -- but it won't brick the phone, it just needs "approved software" to be dropped back on there. Knowing the wealth of talent in the Android development community, we're still really hopeful this nonsense is going to get circumvented either way, but at least we can breathe a little easier knowing that Moto isn't out to destroy your multi-hundred-dollar investment.

[fiduce Posted Jul 16th 2010 10:40PM]

I just don't care about what ever reason they give : I will never buy any Motorola device until they clearly turn their back to eFuse-like customer-sheep technology.

[ol1bit Posted Jul 17th 2010 2:34AM]

I have the original and don't have a need to hack it.

Also DMCA says you can't legally do that. Someone needs to concentrate more on getting rid of the DCMA instead of root kiting your phone.

Do that first, then root kit away.

[pika2000 Posted Jul 17th 2010 4:29AM]

Grab the Nexus One while it lasts. The days of unlocked Android phone (The Nexus One being the only one) in the US is ending.

[jcom Posted Jul 17th 2010 9:41AM]

Some of you commented that it only affect very small minority and motorola dont care if they lose thier sales. That is suck a dumb statement. Geeks are small community but very vocal and they influence lots of people. The so called geeks have heavy influence over family and friend purchase decisions. For example I loved my moto droid and showed atleast 200 people what is capable of and atleast 20 people bought it because of me. Now guess what iam gonna tell atleast 200 people how much motorola sucks and not to buy thier phones. Iam gonna reccommend samsung and HTC and what ever other company that doesnt force this crap on us. I guarantee Motorola will lose atleat 100,000-300,000 sales over a span of a year. IT will take a bigger hit to their long term brand image.
Big Fail for motorola on this.

[jslaroche Posted Jul 17th 2010 11:39AM]

Most people who buy a phone are not into hacking it or using a custom rom so it is a non issue if you want to hack your phone don't buy a Droid X, there are plenty of hackable phones out there. It's the same reason the Iphone is so popular they want the phone and put up with the issues.

[gamerdad Posted Jul 17th 2010 11:53AM]

Maybe they did this because customers like myself have been running froyo and a 1ghz ultra low voltage kernel for a month now on their 9 month old phone and because of it won't want to upgrade to newer phones for a long while. If it wasn't for rooting and custom roms, I would have upgraded to an incredible or droid x by now. I'm hoping the droid 2 isn't sporting this efuse...

[bkuhn Posted Jul 17th 2010 2:16PM]

Motorola appears to give no evidence that legal requirements are placed on them that requires them to lock-down the device cryptographically. Likely, the only thing that "forces" them to do this is their contractual agreements with partners/carriers. I've written about this issue in my blog: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/07/15/motorola-admits.html

[losdrivare Posted Jul 18th 2010 5:12AM]

The possibility to run custom tailored ROMs is a must when I'm buying a smartphone. If that is not possible on a Motorola, then I'll not buy a Motorola, very simple.

Though, the decision to make it impossible to run custom ROMs is hard to understand. It should be up to the consumer what he/she wants to do with the device he/she bought and paid for, if the consumer wants to void warranty and run custom ROMs, then why not? It is not Motorolas problem.