Coming Soon, a Chip to Detect Hardware Virus

                Scientists, including one of Indian origin, are developing a new chip that can detect malicious circuitry and prevent hardware viruses from sabotaging medical devices, and financial, military or government electronics. The outsourcing of chip design and fabrication is a $350 billion business and bad actors along supply chain have many opportunities to install malicious circuitry in chips. These “Trojan horses” look harmless but can allow attackers to sabotage public infrastructure, Hardware defects are invisible and act surreptitiously. Researchers, are developing a chip with both an embedded module, that proves its calculations are correct, and an external module, that validates the first module’s proofs. This configuration, an example of and approach called “verifiable computing”, keeps tabs on a chip’s performance and can spot telltale signs of Trojans.