Why we should design our computer chips to self-destruct
You can鈥檛 steal what isn鈥檛 there.
That鈥檚 the idea behind superspy Ethan Hunt鈥檚 legendary self-destructing tapes in the 鈥淢ission: Impossible鈥� movies, and now the concept is coming to life: Engineers at Xerox PARC have developed a chip that explodes into tiny, irreparable pieces upon command.
The new technology, unveiled at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency鈥檚 (DARPA) 鈥淲ait, What?鈥� event in St. Louis Thursday, is part of the agency鈥檚 project 鈥� and comes as concerns over data breaches and compromised privacy rise in a variety of industries, from healthcare to retail to military.
鈥淭he applications we are interested in are data security and things like that,鈥� Gregory Whiting, a senior scientist at PARC in Palo Alto, Calif., . 鈥淲e really wanted to come up with a system that was very rapid and compatible with commercial electronics.鈥�
As digital technology evolves and grows dependent on increasingly accessible data, privacy advocates have raised the question of how to protect personal information and maintain obscurity. The result has been a growing interest in self-destructing or transient technology, which some experts say could play a key role in securing sensitive data in the future.
鈥淚nformation retrieval technologies have allowed us to arrange and rearrange access to a dizzying set of public records and personal information,鈥� wrote Christopher Kotfila, a research assistant at The Research Foundation for the State University of New York, . But 鈥渨hile many benefits have come from the power of relevance-based search engines, one of the costs has been a loss of obscurity.
鈥淪elf-destructing data may provide the solution, shifting control over digital communication back to owners,鈥� he wrote.
Already a number of companies have gone commercial with the concept.
Snapchat, which lets users send images or captions to friends for a window of time before the message becomes inaccessible, has become wildly popular since its launch in 2011, Mr. Kotfila noted.
Google鈥檚 Gmail service in June released an 鈥淯ndo Send鈥� feature that 鈥渁llows people ... to cancel a sent mail if they have second thoughts immediately after sending,鈥� 鈥� though the feature is limited to 30 messages. Another email service, , is a browser extension that encrypts messages and lets users choose when to let their emails expire, or self-destruct.
And Blackberry and Boeing teamed up last year to develop 鈥渁 super-secure Android-based smart phone,鈥� designed for workers in the defense and security fields, that can self-destruct if anyone tries to get at its hard drive, 海角大神 reported.
For DARPA, the goal is to create 鈥渆lectronics that last precisely as long as they are needed,鈥� Alicia Jackson, a project manager for the agency, . 鈥淭he breakdown of such devices could be triggered by a signal sent from command or any number of possible environmental conditions, such as temperature.鈥�
PARC鈥檚 new computer chip promises to do just that. Made of Gorilla Glass 鈥� the same tough material used for smartphone displays 鈥� the chip was built in heavy stress, so that certain triggers could cause the glass to shatter. At the St. Louis event, demonstrators triggered the chip鈥檚 self-destruct circuit using a photo-diode activated by a laser light, but mechanical switches and radio signals would work just as well, according to IDG News.
The chip presents an exciting prospect in applications such as computer security. If a chip fabricated on glass was used to store an encryption key, the destruction of the chip could assure complete destruction of the key in an instant 鈥� perhaps as part of a routine process or when the key falls into the wrong hands.
