Huang: Can We Build Trustable Hardware?
Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has posted a detailed article on
why creating trustable hardware is so difficult and describing a project
he's working
on to do it anyway. "While open hardware has the opportunity to
empower users to innovate and embody a more correct and transparent design
intent than closed hardware, at the end of the day any hardware of
sufficient complexity is not practical to verify, whether open or
closed. Even if we published the complete mask set for a modern
billion-transistor CPU, this 'source code' is meaningless without a
practical method to verify an equivalence between the mask set and the chip
in your possession down to a near-atomic level without simultaneously
destroying the CPU."