I think the best way to protect from this is two-fold. 1) Cybersecurity, and specifically the art of finding bugs, needs to be made an essential part of Bitcoin education. 2) The community needs to start producing its own chips. Whether by 3D printing or some other way.
Yes, some kind of hardware that can sign transactions that can be built and verified at home using more standardized building blocks rather than a fully integrated Secure Element. I haven't looked into the details but something *like* this betrusted.io device that incorporates a user-coded FPGA in lieu of a microprocessor.
https://betrusted.io/
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Transparency is the bedrock of trust. Understanding what makes a thing tick gives us an evidence-based reason to trust that it works as intended. Betrusted is unique in that, instead of a black-box CPU chip, it uses reconfigurable hardware – an FPGA – for computation. This means you can compile our reference processor design from source, instead of simply having to accept on faith that this black epoxy rectangle contains precisely the circuits it advertises. "