Comment by alightsoul
16 hours ago
Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.
Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.
Normally the codes would be downloaded automatically from a server but sometimes the server would go down due to negligence because it would be owned by the school and well, student's laptops would start getting locked and they would have to go to a specific office somewhere in the city to get an unlock code from the it admin
It could be disabled from the bios somehow if you knew the bios password or the bios could be reflashed with a programming Clip directly on the bios flash chip itself.
Normally you have to unlock the phone before unlocking the bootloader, and that is the protection.
I would think they are guessing most people's passwords are weak or something. Like a screen pattern is weak, can be broken in just 300k attempts or maybe less because people use the same patterns and people can't be bothered to use passphrases.
A screen pattern is a different way to enter a PIN with no duplicate digits. Both PINs and patterns rely upon the security processor to resist bruteforces.