Morpheus is a new microarchitecture that performs magnetic code encryption and random relocation of key data 20 times per second. This new architecture has been prototyped and presented at ACM, an international conference on computers. It can be said that it has taken one step further to realize a computer that cannot be hacked.
Morpheus is a micro-architecture that makes it impossible to obtain variables necessary for hacking by performing magnetic code encryption and random relocation of key data 20 times per second and once every 50 milliseconds. According to the paper, a method of stealing program execution by exploiting the same bug by overwriting confidential data using the value pointed to by a pointer is a common method in modern hacking. However, Morpheus says that if a hacker finds a valid bug for hacking, the information necessary to use the bug disappears in 50 milliseconds. The development of Morpheus has been funded and cooperated by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA.
The Morpheus development team announced the RISC-V processor with Morpheus as a demonstration chip at the international conference ACM held from April 13th. According to Todd Austin, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who led the development team, the demo chip is equipped with a function that adjusts the encryption frequency to balance security and resource consumption, and automatically increases the encryption frequency when an attacker is detected. Even if the encryption is automatically set at about once every 50 milliseconds, encryption is performed at a speed that is thousands of times faster than the time required for hacking, but the performance is said to decrease by only 1%.
The development team said that as people have the potential to create new bugs and security vulnerabilities every time they write code, the existing hacking countermeasures that fix bugs one by one are not very efficient, while Morpheus solves the magic cube that relocates before time to break. It is emphasized that it is impossible because it is the same as that. Related information can be found here .