According to the latest reports, recently, a group of researchers from the University of Michigan, in the United States, has claimed, that they have managed to develop the world’s first unhackable processor, which is known as MORPHEUS. This all-new unhackable processor is capable of executing data encryption operations so fast, that its algorithms change at a faster rate than a hacker can act against them, hence, it provides much greater security than the defense mechanisms of the current processors can provide.
Meet The World’s First Unhackable Processor
A group of researchers from the University of Michigan, in the United States, has claimed, that they have managed to develop the world’s first unhackable processor, which is known as MORPHEUS.
This all-new unhackable processor is capable of executing data encryption operations so fast, that its algorithms change at a faster rate than a hacker can act against them, hence, it provides much greater security than the defense mechanisms of the current processors can provide.
If anything could stand out the last year 2018 was the huge number of serious vulnerabilities that were discovered in the processors of AMD and, especially, Intel. As the well-known flaws like Meltdown, Specter and, more recently PortSmash and SPOILER have driven the researchers of both companies crazy in their attempt to solve them.
However, a team of scientists from the University of Michigan, led by Todd Austin, has just presented its new architecture for processors, called MORPHEUS, which is capable of blocking attacks on the processor of the devices where it is mounted.
For this, the processor is able to change certain aspects of its architecture completely and randomly, so that an attacker never knows what he/she is trying to access accurately. But, more importantly, MORPHEUS is able to do this job extremely quickly and with very low resource consumption.
Basically, the key to the security that the all-new MORPHEUS processor wants to provide is that the processor changes certain components of its code known as “undefined semantics”. This component simply refers to, the location, size, and content of the program code.
Hence, if any case, an attacker wants to use these data, which are usually fixed, he/she will not be able to locate them permanently, as 50ms later he/she will have changed to other values. This rate of reordering of the code is several times higher than the most modern and powerful techniques of hacking that are used today with current processors.
The MORPHEUS architecture was installed, fora demonstration, in a processor with RISC-V architecture, which is an open source chip that is used extensively in the development of prototypes. With this processor, MORPHEUS underwent “Control-Flow” attacks, one of the most aggressive techniques used by hackers in the world. And it simply managed to overcome all the attacks that were carried out with complete success.
As expected, the ratio of impaired processor architecture code has a cost in resources of the system. However, scientists have developed MORPHEUS and claimed that the cost of such resources is only 1% and the speed with which the code becomes random can be varied, depending on what the processor is going to be used for. This also includes an attack detector, which analyzes when one of these could be occurring and accelerates the speed based on this data.
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