>Hello Adam.  Thanks for taking the time to write.  We did design for the 77,
>we knew of its very poor (non-existent?) code protection of FLASH memory,
>but chose the part anyway, took a gamble that the 77A would be available by
>go time, but it's not.  We never knew that even code protected flash was
>readable by internal reads, meaning that any amateur hacker could put on
>code to do a memory dump of the code protected area.  That is the achilles
>heel we didn't know about.  That seems quite ridiculous, and in fact, is.


this isn't quite correct.

you can't put any code on the part to do a memory dump on a protected chip.  if all the program memory is marked as
protected, you can't write to it (at least externally) so you can't get any code on there to do a read then dump.

i've just tested this to be sure on my f877's, if i set code protect on, i can't write back to them at all until i do
an erase operation on the part.


david dunn

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.