At Xerox PARC manufactured chip self-destructs

Remember this spectacular episode of the beginning of the movie "Mission Impossible 2", where Ethan Hunt gets the message loses self-destructing glasses? The ideal device for storing secret information.

A инженеры from Xerox PARC invented something no less effective, and at the same time real and easier. A computer chip that can destroy itself on command, thus destroying any data stored on it. In operation it was shown at the presentation of the company DARPA «Wait, What?» On Thursday.



"We aim to use our developments in areas such as data security, - says Gregory Uiting [Gregory Whiting], principal investigator for PARC. - We wanted to come up with a system that works very quickly and is compatible with modern electronic components ».



Here you see the chip ... i>

And no explosives - the chip is placed on a solid substrate of glass Gorilla Glass. Engineers processed glass, it zakalivaya by thermochemical ion exchange . This chemical tempering - surface treatment of glass in a bath with a special salt melt at a certain temperature cycle, which creates favorable conditions for the replacement of positively charged sodium ions to the positively charged potassium ions on the glass surface.



And-and-and-and - it is not i>

The result is a very hard glass, which is the appearance of the slightest crack completely broken down into very small pieces. Further, when the chip is located on the substrate, it is activated in the resistance, which begins to heat a small portion of glass. Because heating the glass cracks and shatters into pieces. As each fragment remains in the same voltage as the entire glass, shards continue to break into smaller and smaller over tens of seconds.

As a result, the chip is ideal for storage of information such as encryption keys, passwords, access codes. The presentation served as a trigger for the destruction of the photodiode, activation of desired contour reacted to light. Technically, the trigger can be anything - from a mechanical switch to radio.

In the laboratory Xerox PARC was born a lot of things related to computers and electronics, familiar to us in today's life. That's where Steve Jobs spied posvemestno now use the concept of a graphical user interface, WYSIWYG.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/262464/