[squarefoot]

> These chips are intricate enough to potentially contain backdoors. While it is something I never thought about with respect to Espressif, it does seem plausible that they could be a target.

They could indeed be, as already are all PC's, phones, TVs and any smart connected household appliance, no matter if they're built in China. I would never ever consider building a IoT home system wthout putting it behind a dedicated and firewalled hardware subnet that protects from the outside and from the inside. Ok, the firewall hardware itself could contain tampered chips with firmware instructing them to encapsulate and redirect certain traffic outside of the rules without reporting it, but that's another story; when in doubt, I prefer to consider every piece of hardware that is closed and connected as potential spyware.