> at the end of the day any hardware of sufficient complexity is not practical to verify, whether open or closed. Even if we published the complete mask set for a modern billion-transistor CPU, this “source code” is meaningless without a practical method to verify an equivalence between the mask set and the chip in your possession down to a near-atomic level without simultaneously destroying the CPU.

Sounds about right to me. And if you can't trust the hardware, it goes without saying that you can't trust the software running on it.

They go on to explain/promote their "Betrusted" verifiable hardware approach, which is good and all, but ultimately I feel suffers from the same fundamental problem (hard to verify the actual hardware you're using without destroying it). Some mitigation strategies are offered, though. I'm glad they aren't over-promising, and are clear that these are steps in the right direction rather than full solutions.

I think most people (myself included) don't have the technical expertise to know if a given verification is valid, either. Such people would need to offload that task to someone else — someone they must trust, yet again.

The notion of trust is so profound and slippery, even without involving computers. It's fascinating to see it play out in a more rigorously-observed fashion through modern technology.