Morpheus CPU puzzles hackers

Morpheus CPU. University of Michigan.

Morpheus is an ultra-secure RISC-V processor that was designed by a group of graduate students and faculty at the University of Michigan. The RISC-V processor turns the computer into a puzzle so tough to piece together that it deters attackers altogether. This summer, 580 cybersecurity researchers spent 13,000 person-hours trying to break into this new type of processor. They all failed. The processor, while performing its expected tasks, also performs such unexpected operations that it thwarts attackers from deploying their usual arsenal of weapons. For example, it uses functions that change the underlying machine implementation every few hundred milliseconds; since the implementation is always unique at any given time, by the time you figure it out, it has changed again. More specifically, it moves and encrypts pointers (objects that contain the addresses of data in memory) with a Simon block cipher every 100 milliseconds. Permanently encrypted pointers in the code defeat an attacker’s ability to understand what is going on. Practically speaking, it means that the attacker faces an ever-changing black box, which is the outer limit of security-through-obscurity.

This technique only blocks low-level attacks such as the infamous Meltdown and Specter. If your code in the application layer allows SQL injections, the CPU won’t save you…

⇨ IEEE Spextrum, Jay Peters, “Morpheus Turns a CPU Into a Rubik’s Cube to Defeat Hackers.”

2021-04-13