DARPA working on an "Unhackable" computer system

[peteyt 393]

Read an interesting article last night. DARPA are working on a new computer system, that they seem to believe would be "unhackable."

Apparently they have identified seven classes of hardware weakness, that if fixed, could close almost half of software backdoors. These include permissions and privileges, buffer errors, resource management, information leakage, numeric errors, crypto errors and code injection. DARPA aims to completely patch these up within five years.

At the same time they are working on a project dubbed Morpheus. Apparently Morpheus's hardware will regularly move data around the computer randomly, deleting past versions at the same time. What they claim this means is that if someone managed to break into a system trying to access data, even if they are successful the location of that data would be moved before they could access it. According to the report, this would protect software, passwords and other thing, because everything would be constantly moving. They compare this system to that of a Rubik cube and mention it could even help protect from new undiscovered threats.

 

Firstly - why anyone would use the word "Unhackable," I don't know. The article does point out that the titanic was "Unsinkable." To me it seems like an open invitation to prove them wrong. I would have thought people dealing with security would learn the key important fact now, nothing is ever 100 percent, certainly when it comes to security. Rather than trying to make something unhackable, they should really be working on better procedures in the event something does become hacked.

Also I don't understand how moving things around could work - firstly if it was just files, surely the hacker could just look for their new location. If everything is constantly moving, it sounds like it could cause more problems than solutions. Data will always need to be accessed by someone and so there will need to be an easy path for that user. No good if the data can't be retrieved by the people who need it if it keeps moving. Also, people can easily be fooled. It's often noted that people are generally the weakest link in security.

https://newatlas.com/darpa-morpheus-unhackable-computer/52690/

[nonamelab 0]

Original Source :

hxxp://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/25336-unhackable-computer-under-development-with-3-6m-darpa-grant

Probably they discovered : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheus_(software) and now they use that to move data around  :>

 

Edited December 24, 2017 by nonamelab