New Development Offers Chip Cybersecurity 

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Researchers have been seeking more effective ways of securing semiconductors after it had been revealed that security holes had affected billions of chips. The Morpheus technology aims to frustrate hackers trying to gain control of microchips by presenting them with a rapidly changing target. The project is backed by the US Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The aim of the Morpheus chip – still at the prototype stage –  is to make it incredibly difficult for hackers to exploit key software that helps govern the chip’s operation. Morpheus does this by repeatedly randomizing elements of the code that attackers need access to in order to compromise the hardware. This can be achieved without disrupting the software applications that are powered by the processor. Researcher Todd Austin, a professor at the University of Michigan, has been able to get the chip’s code “churning” to happen once every 50 milliseconds—way faster than needed to frustrate the most powerful automated hacking tools. So even if hackers find a vulnerability, the information needed to exploit it disappears in the blink of an eye. The technology can defend against a wide range of cyberattacks. The prototype chip also boasts software that aims to spot new kinds of digital assaults, adjusting its churn rate according to the severity of the threat.  There’s a cost to all this, according to technologyreview.com. The technology causes a slight drop in performance and requires somewhat bigger chips. But the military may accept this trade-off in return for greater security on the battlefield, but it could limit Morpheus’s appeal to businesses and consumers.