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Having NFC or Bluetooth on the hardware makes me paranoid. Aren't their software stacks large enough to be a security risk?

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I've never implemented NFC, but the embedded BLE stacks I've looked at from various vendors make my eyes bleed. I somewhat feel that way about USB as well, but at least USB is sufficiently simple that interfacing directly with the USB peripheral (on the microcontroller side) is tractable.

I love the silicon that exists in the world today, I truly do, but I really do wonder whether or not TI or ST aught to be building their own SDKs. They just don't have the same software talent that they have on the hardware side.

I mean, if it's properly open source and user-controlled, you should be able to build a firmware that just comments out all of that, right?

Also even better if there was a solder pad that needed to be connected before the wireless would work.

This is more or less what we do with Solo. The NFC keys (both usb-a or usb-c) have an extra NFC chip that harvests energy and powers up the main micro controller. The non-NFC keys don't have that chip, so it's pretty evident by just looking at the board.

I have a solo btw. Its rather nifty. Good job on it.

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