Extended abstract: Circuit CAD tools as a security threat

The demand for trusted and tamper-resistant computing platforms has placed security at the leading edge of research and industrial practice. Reported hardware-security breaches have already led to loss of confidential information, identity theft, intercepted cellular communications, and IP burglary. Our work demonstrates that ICs can be easily compromised by tampering with CAD tools or scripts that run these tools, suggesting that developing effective countermeasures against such attacks is a major research challenge. Our work is especially relevant to industrial uses of open-source EDA.