The language used in this article seems very much like the author has something to sell and is trying to create the impression that it is advanced and mysterious. The claims about improvements of many orders of magnitude in speed and cost as well as the unavailability of information and services to private individuals suggest to me that someone is trying to get a defense contract for some overhyped technology that won't really deliver what's promised.
Backdoors --- intentional, accidental, or (most typically) "deniably" accidental --- are extremely common in software of all kinds, from RTOS kernels to web stacks to third-party database wrapper libraries.
Are there backdoors in silicon? Of course there are backdoors in silicon. Just like in software, most of them will be deniably accidental. It's unlikely we'll be able to trace most of them to deliberate sabotage, but the net effect will be the same.
Having set the stage, consider: the competency required to manually evaluate silicon packages is extraordinarily rare. Even if you wanted to shell out 6 figures for a competent superficial evaluation, you'd have a lot of trouble finding available Chris Tarnovskys to do the work.
If you have 50% of the competence of Tarnovsky and the ability to automate any significant portion of that work, you can probably write your own ticket.
So: what's the likelihood that any such person, with an actual affiliation to a respected EE/CS security program, would just be making stuff up?
"Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We boot your servers, we back up your drives, we write your applications, we maintain your kernels. We guard your data. Do not... fuck with us. "
Having set the stage, consider: the competency required to manually evaluate silicon packages is extraordinarily rare. Even if you wanted to shell out 6 figures for a competent superficial evaluation, you'd have a lot of trouble finding available Chris Tarnovskys to do the work.
Could secure hardware be bootstrapped? Could we use the embarrassment of riches we have in terms of number of transistors available to implement arrays of small and fast processors which can emulate security hardware and be programmed using formal verification? This way, we could concentrate all of our scrutiny on one unit, and change much of the hardware problem into a software one. It wouldn't be as fast or as cheap, but it might be fast enough and workably secure.
I'm only going based on the tone of the writing and the content of the patent application; both are written like hype. He might actually be doing something novel, or he might just be trying to get attention for his company and not doing anything special relative to others in the field. There may be good reasons to avoid talking about details in his field, but when someone selling something does that, hype is a reasonable default explanation.
It sounds to me like grant-proposal language. I wouldn't call it hype, but it is meant to convince people that you have done something important, and you are deserving of more money to do further research.
Edit: they seem to have submitted a patent application for the process of sending test signals to a chip and monitoring it with an oscilloscope: http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Integrated-circuit-inv...