This chip can fight off hackers

Gulf Today Report

A team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has designed and commissioned the production of a computer chip that implements post-quantum encryption very efficiently.

These chips could provide protection against future attacks by hackers using quantum computers.

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The researchers also embedded Trojans into the chip in order to study ways to detect this type of “chip factory malware.”

“Our chip is the first chip for quantum post-coding that relies entirely on a hardware/software co-design approach,” says Professor George Siegel.

“As a result, it is about 10 times faster when encrypting with Kyber – one of the most promising candidates for post-quantum encryption – than chips that rely entirely on software solutions.

They also use about eight times less power and are almost as flexible.”

The chip is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).

This type of specialized microcontroller is often manufactured in large numbers to corporate specifications.

The TUM team has modified the open source chip design so that the capabilities of post-quantum encryption of the chip are facilitated by modification of the processor core and special instructions that speed up the necessary computations.

“We still know very little about how Trojans are used by real attackers. To develop protective measures, we need to think like an attacker and try to develop and hide our own Trojans. So we have developed and installed four Trojans in our post-quantum chip, each of which works in a completely different way.”