Huang: Can We Build Trustable Hardware?

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has posted a detailed article onwhy creating trustable hardware is so difficult and describing a projecthe's working on to do it anyway. "While open hardware has the opportunity toempower users to innovate and embody a more correct and transparent designintent than closed hardware, at the end of the day any hardware ofsufficient complexity is not practical to verify, whether open orclosed. Even if we published the complete mask set for a modernbillion-transistor CPU, this 'source code' is meaningless without apractical method to verify an equivalence between the mask set and the chipin your possession down to a near-atomic level without simultaneouslydestroying the CPU."