The original article was censored so it's hard to tell if it's bogus or not. I believe it's still very interesting. Here http://bit.ly/JKatpV http://bit.ly/JKat

The original article was censored so it's hard to tell if it's bogus or not. I believe it's still very interesting. Here http://bit.ly/JKatpV http://bit.ly/JKatpV it's an older paper from the same author detailing a technique about reading thermal signatures from individual transistors on the chip with a microscope and an astronomy camera. A little more advanced than jtag fuzzing. However I agree that's very hard to insert a hardware backdoor on a mask, even a FPGA mask. Given the hundreds of variations and revisions that FPGAs normally have, it's about impossible to cover even a single familiy. A more plausible explanation is: some big client got very angry in the past because they lost the password and the FPGA vendor didn't had a "master key" to unlock it. Still, very stupid move.