deciphering the content of an FPGA, even knowing the application circuit and functional specifics can be a real headache, and there's seldom any guarantee that you've gotten it right. Further, the primary reason one would want to steal the IP is to replicate the product in question.

All the time spent on "cracking" someone else's work could be much better spent on observing its behavior and producing a better product instead. That's certainly what the original developers are doing, and they've got a head start.

What most frightens people in the know, in the current environment, is that if a determined adversary, terrorist group, or other attacker finds such a device in place within the power, communication, or transportation infrastructure and figures out how to access it remotely (quite unlikely), he'd be well placed to wreak havoc on the systems in which he found the device.

I don't know how others use programmable logic, but I've never put programmable logic in a circuit in such a way that it could be directly accessed from a remote location. I don't even know whether that's possible.

RE