On Tuesday the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced it will be spending $3.6 million to develop a computer with hardware that is billed by its creators as an “unsolvable puzzle.” The project is called MORPHEUS, a homage to the ancient Greek god of dreams, and is intended to be a more robust alternative to today's so-called “patch and pray” approach to cybersecurity.

Instead of creating software patches for known security vulnerabilities and hoping that they fix the problem, the MORPHEUS hardware is designed so that information can be quickly and randomly shuffled around a computer. Todd Austin, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan compared trying to attack MORPHEUS to “solving a Rubik’s cube, and every time you blink, I rearrange it.”

According to DARPA, 40 percent of software exploits available to hackers could be eliminated if a handful of different types of hardware weaknesses could be eliminated, such as errors with cryptography, code injection, and information leakage.

Read More...