said by openbox9:Maybe a little less concern, but I imagine the reviews will still happen...especially for critical infrastructure hardware/software.
I am skeptical how much such analysis can achieve, especially when done by hobbyists. They simply don't have the equipment. Transistors are extremely small now (~ 25 nm). You can hide a lot of malicious stuff at such a microscopic level. NSA might be capable of properly dissecting it, but not many other people have the expertise or the equipment necessary.
Also most of the firmware/microcode on these chips is not open source. That's another problem. It makes it that much harder to reverse engineer.