Boffins design security chip to spot hidden hardware trojans in processors Scientists at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering have designed a new form of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to spot hidden vulnerabilities deep within a processor's design. Very few people run their own chip fabrication plants these days. Most processors are designed by one firm, which then …
For the fabless chip company they always have the option of decapping a chip and comparing what they see to the mask designs they'd originally sent off to the fab.
It's a lot of work and needs some specialised kit, but it's a certain way of being sure. Anything like this that gets you a similar result but more automatically sounds like a good thing.
The slice and scan technique certainly sounds like a better way to check to me.
If "naughty" fab were to add a delay into their "naughty" bit, so it only became operable after several gazillion operations, it wouldn't show up during electrical testing unless the implementation had been particularly bad.
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