This quantum chip has been infected with dangerous malware, but for a good cause

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• This quantum chip has been infected with dangerous malware, but for a good cause

The researchers have developed a chip that integrates 4 hardware-based Trojans, which they hope to use to help them study and develop effective strategies to reverse these hardware-based attacks. Designed by scholars at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the chips are intended to effectively incorporate post-quantum cryptography, in light of the fact that quantum computers are expected to make current encryption algorithms absolutely superfluous. The chip, which has been approved for production, is a milestone as it successfully solves the problem of high processing power required by post-quantum encryption methods. “Ours is the first post-quantum cryptography chip based entirely on a hardware/software co-design approach. As a result, it's about ten times faster when encrypted with Kyber, one of the most promising contenders for post-quantum cryptography, compared to chips that rely entirely on software solutions. It also consumes about 8 times less energy and is almost as flexible”, explains Georg Sigl, Master of Information Technology Security, who leads the TUM research team.

Hardware Trojans Inside

The chip is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and is a modification of an open source chip design based on the open source RISC-V standard. The design also incorporates a specially developed hardware accelerator. Thinking that hardware Trojans could negate the benefits of post-quantum cryptography, researchers also embedded some of them into their chip to observe and study them in action. “To develop protection measures, we must think like attackers and also try to develop and cover up our Trojans. On our post-quantum chip blog, we have developed and also installed 4 hardware Trojans, each of which works in a completely different way,” explains Sigl. The researchers will study the chips over the next few months, before disarming them in a complex research process. The aim here is to develop standardized processes to verify that the chips that come out of the assembly line meet the specifications and that their design has not been disturbed by high-tech colored agents.