Many microcontrollers allow you to lock them to prevent reading out the contents of flash. On Silicon Labs EFM32 [a-zA-Z]+ Gecko devices, this is done by disabling most of the SWD interface so that accessing memory through a debugger is impossible.

You lock the device by writing to the Memory System Controller peripheral. Unlocking is a little more complicated: according to Application Note 0062 “Programming Internal Flash Over the Serial Wire Debug Interface”, you must write to registers on the SW-DP and AHB-AP which are some kind of esoteric ARM business.

OpenOCD can do both.

# Lock
reset init
mww 0x400c0008 1
mww 0x400c0010 0x0fe041fc
mww 0x400c000c 1
mww 0x400c0018 0
mww 0x400c000c 8
reset_config srst_only ;# ???
reset run
shutdown

# Unlock
dap apreg 0 0x4 0xcfacc118
dap apreg 0 0x0 1
dap apreg 0 0x8 ;# ???
sleep 1000 ;# ???
dap apreg 0 0x0 2
reset_config none ;# ???
reset init
shutdown

I don’t remember why the commands marked with ;# ??? (a Tcl inline comment) were necessary. It might work without them. It might set your device on fire. Who knows?