Hello List!
Well, I like to summarize my (personal) points of view to the LibreSilicon Project.
Yes, we like to be free and open. And we like to be free of bug-doors and/or back-doors. As long as we democratize the fundamental process of silicon fabrication of course we become a target. And since Snowden we all aware of the effort, which some three-letter-agencies investing to get into other countries, companies and citizen around the world. Stuff like TAO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations) is just ridiculous.
Our defense only transparency can be. No secrets, no hidden features but being robust. And no technical solution can extinguish the human factor.
So, being as open as possible, writing excellent documentation and publish them is our educational mission.
And IMHO, we have this important long-term action items, without priority among each other:
* establish a robust infrastructure, without single-point-of-failures (like located in one country, hosted at one company, based on health/wealth of a single person)
* enforce the tool chain from HDL down to GDSII and fabrication for reproducibility and step-wise verification/equivalence checking
* set-up a tool chain for going backward, from die-pics over layout recognition back to human-readability and computer-comparability against the original HDL.
Is this really paranoiac? I do not think so.
Best Regards, Hagen Sankowski