Morpheus turns a processor into a Rubik's cube to defeat hackers.
Vaishnavi U M
credits: University of Michigan
Have you heard about Morpheus?
Morpheus is a secure CPU. It was designed at the University of Michigan by a group of graduate students and some faculty of the university. It makes the computer into a puzzle that happens to compute.
About 580 cybersecurity researchers spent almost 13,000 hours to break in to a new type of processor but they were not able to complete that. Hack attack was a big test in US DARPA program with the aim to develop processors that are immune to all hardware vulnerabilities that can be done by a malware. They were able to find a total of 10 vulnerabilities in 5 processors which was developed for SSITH but not a single vulnerability on the University of Michigan processor was found. Todd Austin, Michigan professor of electrical engineering and computer science, told about what makes Morpheus so puzzling that the hackers are not able to find a single vulnerability.
The idea behind is just would essentially make it so mind bogglingly terrible to understand that the attackers would be discouraged from attacking this particular target. The challenge is, how do you make it mind bogglingly difficult to understand for an attacker, and It can detect an attack just by looking at what’s being looked at.