[Galaxy Note 3 Developer Discussion [Developers Onl] shangrila500:
You are correct, what I should have said that he exploited a vulnerability found in the TrustZone of most modern Qualcomm devices to unlock the bootloader on the Moto X.

He found a vulnerability that he exploited to unlock the bootloader on the Moto X on stage and then turned around and sold the information on the vulnerability to Motorola. I can't blame him for selling the exploit after all the crap he has gotten (and hasn't gotten like the bounty on the G2) for helping out the community with rooting and unlocking their devices, he has to make money some way. Since he already looks for vulnerabilities to exploit on android devices this was a win-win for him, he got to do what he enjoys and he got to make money off of it whereas he has been screwed by the community when they were supposed to pay him the bounty for his exploits. He at least gave the community all of the information about the vulnerability so we could use it for our benefit.

Why can it not be used on Samsung devices to unlock their bootloader? I realize that every exploit will be different for each phone but the vulnerability should still be able to be used in a way that may allow us to unlock our bootloaders. The one thing I can see causing a problem will be the eFuse that is already blown. Somehow it will have to be ignored and I am unsure it that will be possible, i would think it would be possible to write a little code to ignore the eFuse (I wonder if Adam Outler had to do that with the VZW Note 2?) The problem would be enabling it and keeping the phone from starting the secure boot process. This TrustZone vulnerability may allow code to be injected that ignores the eFuse but that will be A LOT of work and in the end it really may not be possible because of that damned blown eFuse. I really wonder how Adam got past the eFuse problem on the Note 2 (I am just assuming it has a blown eFuse but it very well may not, I don't remember much about how the Note 2 exploit worked anymore). If it does have a blown eFuse like the Note 3 then it is possible that the same, or a similar, exploit could be used to get past the blown eFuse and unlock the bootloader. The way I understand it is that if the vulnerability wasn't patched on out phones from the beginning, which it supposedly wasn't patched, the eFuse is the only thing standing in the way of a bootloader unlock. Of course a very skilled developer would have to figure out how to exploit the TrustZone vulnerability in a way to allow the bootloader unlock but really it seems the only big the standing in the way is that blown eFuse.

I don't know as much as I would like to about bootloader unlocking (and would love to know more but there are so few sources to learn about bootloader unlocking) when they are locked from the OEM, as is the case with all or almost all VZW phones, so I could just be talking out of my ass. If I am talking out of my ass I would really love an explanation on why the TrustZone vulnerability that he found in most modern Qualcomm devices could not be used on the VZW Note 3. It is a Qualcomm device that was not patched to fix the vulnerability at the time the vulnerability was made known to the community from what i have been able to gather and while the latest updates most likely fixed this vulnerability I would think that, seeing as how most of us don't accept the OTAs, the vulnerability is still there on devices that haven't accepted a certain OTA. While that isn't a solution for people who have updated to the latest OTA it is at least a solution for some of us and would be GREAT if it does come to pass.

I am not holding my breath waiting on the VZW Note 2 bootloader to be unlocked, I realized that was a very unlikely possibility when I got the phone. This does seem to be a promising lead and I have some hopes that it may at least give us a little more control over our devices even if it doesn't lead to a full bootloader unlock.