Cybersecurity in recent years has become particularly relevant for investment not only large corporations, but also the military. In light of recent events, when the worm WannaCry suddenly knocked out more than 300 000 computers worldwide, involuntarily start to think about what it would be nice to protect themselves from such developments. In the American military Agency DARPA also treat this problem very seriously. That is why the military resumed work on frozen project, code-named Morpheus, whose goal is the creation of a computer hack which is impossible.
Project Morpheus is part of a DARPA initiative in the field of computer security, which was allocated $ 50 million. Performers in this case are the scientists from the University of Michigan, which is designing a security system based on the software, as is usual, and laid in the iron components of the system. It is understandable, because such viruses as WannaCry and NotPetya, used a software vulnerability in older versions of the operating systems of the Windows family. Hackers often use such loopholes to gain control over their victims. In this case, the malicious code will be useless.
“Instead of relying on the software, we decided to resort to another approach and to implement all in hardware. Thus we hope to make traditional hacking techniques are totally ineffective,” explains Dr. Linton salmon, program Manager DARPA under the name System Security Through Integrated Hardware and Firmware (SSITH).
The money allocated for the program SSITH, was divided between the nine grants. Scientists from the University of Michigan got $ 3.6 million. System Morpheus is a hardware, regularly and randomly copying and removing data in the computer’s memory, permanently destroying previous versions. Constantly on the move will not only data. Any loophole that hackers could use in normal conditions will also be a “moving target”. Even if a hacker can find a vulnerability, it immediately moves that will make her unavailable for use.
“As a rule, the location of the data in computer memory is not changed. So when a hacker solves the puzzle and finds entrance into the system, we can assume that he won. We’re trying to build a computer, which is a unsolvable puzzle. Imagine a Rubik’s cube, the location of the faces of which changes every time you blink. About the way our system works,” says one of the developers of Morpheus Todd Austin.
DARPA resumed work on the “uncrackable” computer Morpheus
Sergey Grey