Yes, in a properly designed system, programming of fuses should be under strict hardware control, i.e. the power supply for blowing the fuses has to be supplied

Yes, in a properly designed system, programming of fuses should be under strict hardware control, i.e. the power supply for blowing the fuses has to be supplied to a specific pin on the chip, and that the voltage is not applied by default. I'm really disappointed that Raspberry Pi didn't implement hardware protection of the efuses, using the method I described above, or one similar to it. So a jumper would have to be installed, in order to supply power for blowing the fuses. Many Allwinner SoCs have a separate VPP pin, without power supplied to this pin, it's not possible to blow the fuses. I wish the rest of the industry did that. Notably AMD Ryzen CPUs can have their efuses blown in the field, if the Platform Security Processor is compromised: https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-vendor-locking-ryzen-cpus-with-amd-psb-the-video/ https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-vendor-locking-ryzen-cpu... It's just another way malware could compromise your hardware, this time physically disabling it. I'm sure malware authors might end up putting this to use somehow. And that's why the hardware should have this feature disabled by default. It should not be possible to damage hardware through software, period. There must be hardware protection against this, in a well designed system. Anything else is negligence, in my opinion. In the event of malware causing CPUs to be bricked, AMD should be held liable for the costs of replacing the processors, as they should have had foreknowledge of this occurring, when they designed the processors? Ampere Altra ARM processors have a separate pin for efuse power, you can find that in their datasheet below on page 55, and they explicitly state to pull it to ground if you do not want to use it: https://d1o0i0v5q5lp8h.cloudfront.net/ampere/live/assets/documents/Altra_Max_Rev_A1_DS_v1.00_20220331.pdf https://d1o0i0v5q5lp8h.cloudfront.net/ampere/live/assets/doc... Sadly there are no desktop-class Ampere CPUs yet. But that might change in the future.