Hector Martin

On one side, chips have been audited by highly skilled 3rd party lab and are designed for security On the other side, chips are pwned by design... Auditability is great if it improves the security, if no skilled people audit them and they are already pwned, what's the point?

On one side, firmware has not been audited by anyone competent (evidence: ROCA; it's clear that FIPS certification and such is useless) On the other, you can audit it yourself, and people will for a popular product.

FIPS is not very relevant... Common Criteria certification is. (and ROCA chip was CC certified). CC are not perfect (hence ROCA), but it doesn't mean they are useless... It remains far away more difficult to break a CC chip, than a STM32

Auditability is great, but only if it brings more security! Auditability on a broken device only allows everyone to verify it's indeed broken... NDA for secure chips is not ideal, but vendors want to protect their IPs... Designing a secure chip is not easy!

Re NDAs, nonsense. That's all just either security by obscurity (fear of actual flaws being discovered by wider auditing) or corporate image BS. Making your programming spec public does not give away your silicon secrets, otherwise *no* IC vendor would do it.

It allows to understand how countermeasures are working...

No it doesn't. The programming spec is irrelevant for stuff like silicon voltage monitors and metal layer meshes, which are the kinds of things which actually provide environmental security.