Innovation of the week

“Engineers have designed a computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its microarchitecture every few milliseconds,” said

Michael

Irving in

NewAtlas

.com. The

“microarchitecture” of a processor is like its “guts,” executing the instructions that software needs to run on a device. Hackers need to understand it to inject malware. But researchers at the University of Michigan designed a processor, nicknamed Morpheus, that shuffles essential information about its microarchitecture, such as the commands the processor executes or the format of program data. A system running on the processor was “mocked up to resemble a medical database filled with software vulnerabilities.” More than 500 security researchers were invited to hack it, yet “not a single attack made it through its defenses.”