Cybersecurity in recent years has become an especially relevant area for investment not only by large corporations, but also by the military. In light of the recent events, when the WannaCry worm overnight disabled more than 300,000 computers around the world, you involuntarily begin to think that it would be nice to protect yourself as much as possible from such a development of events. The American military agency DARPA also takes this problem very seriously. That is why the military has resumed work on a frozen project, code-named Morpheus, whose goal is to create a computer that is simply impossible to hack.
The Morpheus project is part of the $ 50 million DARPA computer security initiative. The executors in this case are scientists from the University of Michigan, who are developing a security system based not on software, as is usually the case, but embedded in the iron components of the system. This is understandable, because viruses such as WannaCry and NotPetya exploited software vulnerabilities in older versions of Windows operating systems. Hackers often use such loopholes to gain control over their victims' systems. In this case, the malicious code will be simply useless.
“Instead of relying on software, we decided to take a different approach and implement everything at the hardware level. In this way, we hope to make traditional hacking methods completely ineffective,”explains Linton Salmon, DARPA program manager for System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH).
The money allocated for the SSITH program has been split among nine grants. Scientists from the University of Michigan received $ 3.6 million. The Morpheus system is a piece of hardware that regularly and randomly copies and deletes data in a computer's memory, continually destroying past versions. It's not just data that will be constantly moving. Any loophole that hackers would normally take advantage of would also be a moving target. Even if a hacker manages to find a vulnerability, it will immediately move, making it unavailable for exploitation.
“As a rule, the location of data in computer memory does not change. So when a hacker solves this puzzle and finds a login, he can be considered to have won. We are trying to create a computer that is an unsolvable puzzle. Imagine a Rubik's cube, the location of the faces of which changes every time you blink. This is roughly how our system works,”says Morpheus co-developer Todd Austin.
Sergey Gray
