For me the missing link in OSHW is proving the microscopic circuitry we depend on is the same as the design published by the chip designer. It's a form of hashing for circuitry.
Chinese intelligence agencies are convinced NSA pits back doors in their CPUs and HDD, the NSA are convinced the Chinese are doing it to them. And every other intelligence agency just throws it's hands up.
This situation could easily spiral downwards to a Halton of chip improvements, and yet an "institution" such as verifiable open hardware could let everyone trust again.
the solution here is to release the schematics, and the resaulting gate-level netlists. People who want to verify designs can use scan/jtag to verify that designs do waht they claim
I understood that jtag was effectively trusting what the circuit reports back - a bit like asking a binary to tell you it's own md5.
I am interested to know if I am wrong (it's not uncommon) and if scan chains might solve that too.
A different approach might be to fingerprint different areas of the chip under different inputs - so for example when this bus passes over a million zero words, everything connected to it performs in a unique way that would not work if the chip was physically different to it's schematic?
Chinese intelligence agencies are convinced NSA pits back doors in their CPUs and HDD, the NSA are convinced the Chinese are doing it to them. And every other intelligence agency just throws it's hands up.
This situation could easily spiral downwards to a Halton of chip improvements, and yet an "institution" such as verifiable open hardware could let everyone trust again.
Bitcoin is not the only one needing global trust.