Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

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This is still not as bad as the newer laptops in which TPM is soldered onto motherboard and the OS won't boot if it's damaged. You can't even get it repaired, even by the manufacturer without getting a brand new motherboard.

Hardware level security is important, but one must know that whenever you involve hardware into the equation you must allow for collateral damage.

Trusting trust is hard. You can't expect the verifier to verify the security module you got changed from the guy in a basement. Might as well get the OS and kernel from the same guy too.

The reason this disables your phone is the same reason you see a red page when using self signed certificates. The guy vetting you isn't vetted himself. Now there is a case to be made that Apple should just show you a warning and let you use the phone. But this isn't about protecting your privacy, this is about protecting privacy of the guy whose phone you found.

How often do you damage a chip on your motherboard? Or need to replace non-capacitor parts on it?

This is such a problem because it's stuck to the screen, and people need to replace screens all the time.

This only affects the home button. If you replace the screen and keep your original home button, there is no issue.

I co-own a repair shop. We have known about this for a while. We won't replace home buttons for this reason. But we replace hundreds of screens a month with no issues.

Apologies if this sounds rude, because that's not the intent. How can you be sure that people whose screens you've replaced don't then get an "error 53" when they later come to do a software upgrade? Because that's the only time it shows up. Would they know to come back to you about it (possibly shaking fist)?

Sorry for the late response--I just now saw this. We've fixed thousands of screens at this point--we'd have an angry mob if screen replacements caused the issue!

Yes, we have had people come back with Error 53; that's how we knew it existed a while ago. All of them had either had their home button replaced or water damaged. We were able to successfully recover one of them after the Apple Store told the guy there was nothing they could do. It was a water damaged home button and we were able to clean the corrosion off of it by soaking it overnight in a special solution. It came back the next day. If your original home button stops working, though, you are screwed.

Out of three things -- thin phone, hardware level security, and cheapness of repairs -- you get to pick two.

FWIW, I've lost 2 chromebooks to TPM failure in 18 months.

I was under the impression that it wasn't hard to keep the old module when replacing a screen, just that people hadn't always done it.

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