For those too lazy to look it up here's some speculation from Greenwald's IAMA October 31 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nisdy/were_glenn_greenwald_and_janin... Again, plain text and html: While I do not know the name redacted in that report, the "VPN and Web encryption devices" mentioned are most likely hardware SSL acceleration appliances <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration>[1] , and due to the sensitive nature of the backdoor being discussed, are probably in chips fabricated by a US-based silicon designer using a US-located silicon fabrication plant. The reason for that is twofold; first, you don't want a foreign power discovering your backdoor in a chip, and second, you don't want a foreign power inserting their own backdoor. The vendors <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration#Vendors>[2] list in Wikipedia lists the following vendors of SSL appliances: * Barracuda Networks * Array Networks * CAI Networks * Cavium Networks (fabless semiconductor designer) * Cisco Systems * Citrix Systems * Cotendo * Coyote point systems * Crescendo Networks * Exinda * F5 Networks * Foundry Networks * Forum Systems * Freescale Semiconductor (fabless and fab-owning) * Hifn * IBM (fab-owning) * Interface Masters Technologies * jetNEXUS * Juniper Networks * Nortel Networks * Radware * Riverbed Technology * Strangeloop Networks * Sun Microsystems Of those, the two names that stand out most are IBM (which is no stranger to crippling encryption upon the demands of the NSA, with fabrication plants throughout the world and the United States, but which isn't significantly given to florid chip descriptors) and Freescale Semiconductors - it is itself a large semiconductor fabricator, focused on semiconductor fabrication, with foundries in Chandler, AZ and Oak Hill, TX. One not mentioned in that list is Broadcom, a semiconductor manufacturer that is /fabless/, that is - it doesn't own any fabrication capability, itself. It does, however, design a very large percentage of communications chips used in the industry. Not finding a Broadcom chip somewhere in a device is notable. The redacted space is roughly twelve all-caps letters or sixteen mixed-case letters in that font. If we could have someone identify exactly which font was used, then we could experiment with chip names from SSL acceleration device manifests, in that font, and see which fit into the redacted space, possibly with the manufacturer's name in front of the chip - for example, the Freescale SAHARA <http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?code=NETWORK_SECURITY_CRYPTOG>[3] appears to fit nicely - and is touted as having configurable access control to the random number generator and hashing functions on that feature sheet linked - but is just one possibility. Another is the PowerArchitecture™ from Mocana -formerly FreeScale <https://mocana.com/partnerprog/freescale/selling_freescale_sca.pdf>[4] . If I were in the position to lead a project to reverse-engineer the possible name of the chip, I would: * Find out what the top five top-selling SSL acceleration device manufacturers in the world are; * get a list of their best-selling products; * Get parts manifests for each of their popular products, possibly from an electronics tear down research organisation; * Locate and name the crypto accelerator chips; * Determine who designed and fabricated those chips. * Get the name of the font used in the report in the imgur link; * Compose the name of each of those chips in that font at that pitch; * Do a little comparing. /Edit/: OP is assuming that the report is listing /two, separate/ chips. While that is /possible/, it is equally as likely that one variety or species of chip is being named! i.e. /Intel Pentium chips/. There is also no guarantee that the redacted text lists a florid, marketing-friendly name, and may possibly be a code name internal to the US intelligence community. These and other alternatives should not be discounted.