Are there any manufacturers/standards that both pair parts to your phone (to make theft not worthwhile) but also allow authenticated unpairing of parts to your phone (to allow part reuse)? I am conflicted in that I like the idea of right to repair but I also like that locking things down helps fight phone theft.
I imagine that something like this ought to be feasible:
- the phone comes with a secret key baked into it
- upon installation of parts, some secret generated from that key is baked into some secret enclave in the part to “pair” the part with your device so it can’t be harvested
- the OS a provides a function to “unpair” a part with your phone that requires use of the secret key, so you can reuse that part elsewhere
- parts are sold “unpaired” and therefore can be used with any phone (maybe via some open protocol to allow many manufacturers to provide parts, not just the OEM)
With your idea, if my phone gets damaged to a point I can't access that function anymore, all of its parts are non-reusable and complete e-waste. IMO a better and less complicated solution would be to blacklist the serial numbers when a phone is reported stolen, and phones can check serial numbers against a server (if offline just assume the parts are fine for now). Parts should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.
There's probably ways to break this system such as blacklisting the servers from your DNS and never connecting to any network other than your home, but it makes the phone much less practical to use and it only takes one slip-up for the phone to brick itself
I am personally willing to allow some e-waste to make theft not worthwhile, which is mostly just a difference in our values. But maybe there’s a variation that would allow for both.
I imagine that something like this ought to be feasible:
- the phone comes with a secret key baked into it
- upon installation of parts, some secret generated from that key is baked into some secret enclave in the part to “pair” the part with your device so it can’t be harvested
- the OS a provides a function to “unpair” a part with your phone that requires use of the secret key, so you can reuse that part elsewhere
- parts are sold “unpaired” and therefore can be used with any phone (maybe via some open protocol to allow many manufacturers to provide parts, not just the OEM)