In a significant sense it is. It means if it wasn&#x27;t malicious from the factory then it can&#x27;t be malicious now.<p>The best security design for software-in-hardware always starts with the software being burned into ROM. Then you can pick from one of two ways to do updates.<p>The first is the updates are received from the operating system during every boot, so removing power is a reset to factory. So if you throw the system disk in the trash and replace it with a clean one you know you have a clean system. This is in nearly every sense the best way to do it, except that you can&#x27;t fix a firmware bug that exhibits before the OS boots.<p>The second is to have some flash memory on the hardware that can be used to install firmware updates, but have a jumper that determines if the system will look there or in ROM during boot. Then if you want clean updated firmware you set the jumper to ROM, boot and install the clean firmware to the flash and then set it back the other way.<p>The best solution is to support both and then ship the system with the jumper set to ROM. Then you can do 99% of updates automatically through the OS and in the event of a pre-boot firmware bug the affected user can still install the update manually if necessary.