This CPU withstood attacks by 580 hackers for 13,000 hours
Darpa has hired 580 hackers to crack the University of Michigan’s new Morpheus chip. All failed. What is it about Morpheus?
An academic research team at the University of Michigan, led by computer scientist Todd Austin, is developing a new CPU design called Morpheus. That should be “basically insensitive to hacker attacks”.
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Morpheus is constantly encrypting its own functional processes
The so-called Morpheus chip is a secure CPU that turns the computer into a puzzle from the perspective of an intruder. From the outside it cannot be foreseen how Morpheus will calculate. To do this, Morpheus uses an algorithm that constantly encrypts parts of the functional processes in the CPU. He is able to change the encryption every few 100 milliseconds or to shift it to other functional parts. This would create new dead ends for attackers dozens of times per second. The algorithm should also be able to proactively recognize attacks and react accordingly. In this way, there is no pattern to be analyzed, as hackers would need to systematically find and exploit weak points. The encryption effectively obscures how the machine works.
The idea behind it was that a CPU, which basically makes it difficult to get exploits to work on it, doesn’t have to be afraid of individual exploits, according to Todd Austin. His research team was inspired by the human immune system. The project manager explains that it is also able to react to unknown germs and pathogens and adapt in such a way that it can cope with the attack Govtech.
Coordinated hacker attack on Morpheus fails
A recent virtual bug bounty program sponsored by Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proved that the Morpheus chip from Michigan actually works. Darpa is an agency of the United States Department of Defense that carries out research projects for the US armed forces and has an annual budget of three billion US dollars.
A true army of 580 white hat hackers was promised individual prize money of up to $ 50,000 for successfully breaking into the Morpheus chip. In the summer of 2020, the hackers then spent 13,000 hours trying to penetrate the machine’s defense mechanisms. Unsuccessfulas the results now published show.
The chip design, which has been developed in cooperation between Darpa and the University of Michigan since 2015, has thus proven its suitability. Now we have to see how the system can be commercialized, i.e. made affordable for the broader masses, especially in the cloud and edge segment. The project managers now have the company for this purpose Agita Labs founded.
