Researchers Spot Silicon-Level Hardware Trojans in Chips(hackster.io)
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Researchers Spot Silicon-Level Hardware Trojans in Chips
https://www.hackster.io/news/researchers-spot-silicon-level-hardware-trojans-in-chips-release-their-algorithm-for-all-to-try-ba00bbd56248
5 comments
Researchers develop techniques to spot hardware trojans.
I assume that most or all of the common CPUs you can buy today include backdoors inserted at the request of one intelligence agency or another.
Seems like two things are in direct conflict: On one hand, a company needs to protect it's IP and prevent China from outright copying it's designs and selling without the R&D cost attached. On the other hand, but publishing it's designs, it can be verified as safe by anyone.
By publishing their designs, anyone can verify the _published_ design as safe. That doesn't necessarily mean that the chips that are actually manufactured are according to that design.
The idea of these techniques is that the physical chips can be compared against the reference designs. Though I didn't see whether they're able to detect changes in behaviour due to doping.