This actually sounds reasonable with an open source model. Masks are open, so a third party could xray chips coming out of various fabs. Since that's a nondestructive process, identical chips could be tested by multiple parties, and the community can compare notes.
Some of the mask changes suggested in this thread would have pretty serious security implications and would be very hard to detect so I'm not sure if that holds.
Okay, yeah. Read some papers about some different attacks that avoid detection through such means. OTOH, those attacks do seem to rely on the simplistic nature of consistency checks. If this were used to make and open FPGA, it seems like we could run a very rigorous set of test structures that would exhaustively test the operations of various devices on-chip.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/design/xr...
This actually sounds reasonable with an open source model. Masks are open, so a third party could xray chips coming out of various fabs. Since that's a nondestructive process, identical chips could be tested by multiple parties, and the community can compare notes.