archer174

Scan chains by design, give you the ability to load each flop with whatever value you want. Then you can toggle the clock and see the result. If you were very resilient about this you may be able to gather information about the structure. Without a GDS or netlist this is all very far fetched and unlikely. I've said before, but it is far more likely to bribe a rogue designer than to introduce back doors at this level.

This happens to be my area of expertise and is exactly true. Basic DFT would prevent this from happening without a customer knowing. Also, anything below 65nm and the chip is almost certain to have stuck@ scan testing at the minimum. The chip would be marked bad during production and tossed out. The only way in todays market this could get through is if the design was intentionally done this way, otherwise the test vectors would not match the silicon. EDIT: After reading more about their decision to use LBIST for this logic I could see a possible back door, but it does up the complexity of this hack. In my opinion this is a very low probability attack vector. It would be much easier to just pay off a disgruntled designer.

Every time I read the word passion in one of these articles I cringe. This has to be the most overused word in silicon valley. It's really just a convenient way to abuse people. Can't work 90 hours? Not passionate enough. Have a family commitment? Where's your passion? Passion. We get it already.

The US to India has a spelling error. Visa is spelled vist.

I just don't understand how it costs 20million a year to run a community driven website.