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Exploiting memory leaks, injecting code into processes, and a variety of side-channel attacks could become much more difficult when a technique for creating a “morphable” processor architecture becomes widespread.
The new architecture could help break the endless cycle of vulnerability detection and patching by making vulnerabilities less useful, says Todd Austin, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan and leader of the Morpheus project.
The research, known as Morpheus, consists of a series of architectural changes to processors that implement two protections: the randomization of processor elements, which are critical to program execution, and the periodic encryption of those elements, a process called “churn”. The first technique allows a processor to change its architecture, forcing attackers to reverse engineer such changes before exploiting a vulnerability. The second technique changes the architecture quickly enough to prevent attackers from successfully reverse engineering its execution.
“The vast majority of work in computer science is ‘how do I find and fix vulnerabilities?'” He says. “We’re on the other side. Our technology recognizes that an exploit is different from a vulnerability. So we ask: “What interesting parts would an attacker want to get after finding a vulnerability?” – these are pointers, code, address space, organization and a multitude of other things, and we encrypt these. “
The multi-university effort, whose team includes members from Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin, is part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program and its System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program. Between last July and October, the SSITH group held a bug bounty competition – matching the Star Wars theme called Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) – in which almost 600 hackers competed against various processor designs.
Summary of the news:
- The architecture of a processor changes to allow hacking
- Check out all the news and articles on the latest security updates.
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