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FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips.

Posted by Soulskill on from the playing-dirty dept.

janoc writes It seems that chipmaker FTDI has started an outright war on cloners of their popular USB bridge chips. At first the clones stopped working with the official drivers, and now they are being intentionally bricked, rendering the device useless. The problem? These chips are incredibly popular and used in many consumer products. Are you sure yours doesn't contain a counterfeit one before you plug it in? Hackaday says, "It’s very hard to tell the difference between the real and fake versions by looking at the package, but a look at the silicon reveals vast differences. The new driver for the FT232 exploits these differences, reprogramming it so it won’t work with existing drivers. It’s a bold strategy to cut down on silicon counterfeiters on the part of FTDI. A reasonable company would go after the manufacturers of fake chips, not the consumers who are most likely unaware they have a fake chip." Update: 10/24 02:53 GMT by S : In a series of Twitter posts, FTDI has admitted to doing this.

3 of 700 comments (clear)

  1. They are playing with fire by supersat · · Score: 5, Informative

    It looks like they are trying to hide behind their EULA, which says that "Use of the Software as a driver for a component that is not a Genuine FTDI Component MAY IRRETRIEVABLY DAMAGE THAT COMPONENT." But there are reports that this new driver is being delivered via Windows Update, which presumably doesn't show you this EULA.

    Microsoft would be wise to pull this update.

  2. Re:On the other hand... by wed128 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Overall it would be better if USB had just created a standard for this class of devices.

    You mean like the USB CDC standard? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

  3. Re:The good news by ChumpusRex2003 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes. A company called Supereal is selling enormous volumes of "FTDI" chips into the Chinese market. The chips are labelled with the FTDI name and logo and during the USB negotiation, they announce themselves using the FTDI vendor unique ID, in order to use the ubiquitous and flexible FTDI driver (rather than require any development work for their own driver).

    See http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FT... for an example of a fake chip - labelled FTDI on the outside, but supereal on the silicon.

    The problem is that the fake chips are buggy and slow compared to the genuine article, causing headaches for USB peripheral designers and support and reputation headaches for FTDI. There is a huge market for USB UART chips, and it is quite competitive, but few of the products on the market are actually as reliable, fast and robust as you would expect them to be. The FTDI FT232RL is one of the best in terms of reliability and has the best drivers, while also providing some handy bonus functionality.

    It appears that FTDI have reverse engineered the fake chips and found that they can be reprogrammed. When their driver detects a fake chip, it uses the internal configuration commands to erase the EEPROM memory containing the Vendor Unique ID. With this EEPROM blanked, the chip is unable to complete the device detection process in the OS's USB stack.