[penagwin]

Plus aren't many chips made in China? My impression after watching BigClive tear apart stuff was that a lot of Chinese clones use their own chips, and many chips are custom and seem to only exist between Chinese manufacturers (like custom USB charging chips, led chips for flashlights, etc.)

[grenoire]

In order to manufacture these chips you need the schematics. It's the same thing as having the source code and the deployment/compilation instructions: You don't need anything else.

[_ph_]

Strictly speaking, for manufacturing you need the layout for the chip, but extracting a schematic from a given layout is an automated process and used for verification. You create a layout from a given schematic and later check, whether the layout implements that schematic.

[jjoonathan]

Physical Unclonable Functions were supposed to address this.

I wouldn't expect them to hold a state actor at bay for more than a little while, but at least with a PUF in place overproduction isn't as simple as "just make more."