Ozgur Sinanoglu is obsessed with computer chips \u2014 a passion born at age 10 when his father brought home a Commodore 64. Now 42 and the associate dean of engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi, Sinanoglu claims that he and his colleagues have designed an unhackable chip. Given last year\u2019s Meltdown and Spectre \u2014 security flaws that researchers are calling catastrophic because they could affect nearly every computer chip manufactured in the past 20 years \u2014 producing a chip capable of repelling attacks would restore peace of mind to everyone from government agencies to private companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sinanoglu, director of the Design for Excellence Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi, is not the first to make the claim. Because chips combined in central processing units (CPUs) are essentially the brains of computers, savvy engineers around the world have come up with all manner of tricks to keep hackers at bay. And most designs ultimately join the ranks of \u201cgood effort, but not good enough.\u201d In 2010, former U.S. Army computer specialist Christopher Tarnovsky hacked into Infineon\u2019s allegedly unhackable SLE66 CL PE chip used in PCs, gaming consoles and e-cards. Granted, he used a $70,000 electron microscope, tiny conductive needles and acid to siphon off critical data, but the point was made: not unhackable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What sets Sinanoglu apart \u2014 besides his roughly 20 issued or pending patents \u2014 are his heavyweight backers, from the National Science Foundation to the U.S. Department of Defense, which is supporting his research through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Boasting a 15-page r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of academic accomplishments, the Turkish engineer is most concerned with chips fabricated in foundries, or \u201cfabs,\u201d where designers can\u2019t monitor the manufacturing process<\/a>. When chips are fabricated at these third-party facilities, can we really trust the end result? No, Sinanoglu asserts, making it critical that we add defenses to make them resistant to theft or tampering by those seeking financial gain, so-called hacktivists or nefarious state actors<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After analyzing the myriad threats, Sinanoglu and his team added locks to their chip that are comparable to computer passwords except that they\u2019re made up of a unique combination of binary code (0\u2019s and 1\u2019s). Fortheir first design, released in fall 2017, the team added logic, or processing information, to obscure the design. Only people with a special key could hack into the chip and replicate, steal or tamper with it. The NYU team issued a public invitation to hackers to hack away \u2014 a move that turned out to be premature. By October, they realized the logic they\u2019d added gave away information about the key. Sure enough, the following April, a group from China\u2019s Wuhan University hacked the chip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Humbled but not disheartened, Sinanoglu set to work again. As he recounts what came next, he becomes visibly animated, his speech speeding up. The team revisited its process, posing new questions and finding stealthier paths to protecting the chip. Their conclusion? They needed to strip out all logic and leave no structural traces. Hackers could identify the chip design, but they would have no sense of its logic or functionality without the special key of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s. The functionality, says Sinanoglu, is buried in the secret key.They unveiled the subtractive version of their chip in December 2018, and once again invited hackers to have at it. Since then, Sinanoglu says, no one has found the key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As steeped as he is in cybersecurity now, Sinanoglu started on a different course. As a Ph.D. student in computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, he was keenly interested in the environmental factors and manufacturing defects that affect chip functionality. After graduating in 2004, he took a job with Qualcomm, a huge multinational chipmaker, as a senior design and test engineer. Then, in 2006, with a new baby and wishing to be closer to his family in Turkey, he accepted an offer to teach computer science at Kuwait University. That gig ended in 2010 with a new job that would change the trajectory of Sinanoglu\u2019s career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hired as a visiting assistant professor under the guidance of Ramesh Karri, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU\u2019s Tandon School of Engineering, Sinanoglu got hooked on the challenge of staying ahead of bad actors with malicious intent. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole different game,\u201d he says, one that requires constantly outpacing hackers\u2019 creativity and intelligence. \u201cIt\u2019s actually a more fun game,\u201d he\u2019s quick to add with a grin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karri says that most people in cybersecurity \u2014 himself included \u2014 are \u201ca little more cautious\u201dthan his colleaguesabout claiming the existence of an unhackable chip. But \u201cif anybody can make one, it\u2019s Ozgur and JV,\u201d he says, referring to Jeyavijayan \u201cJV\u201d Rajendran, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University who\u2019s working closely with Sinanoglu on the DARPA project. But Dan Goldberg, founder of Castlerock Cyber Security and an information security consultant in Virginia, expresses skepticism that anything \u201cas complex as a microprocessor or general purpose computing device\u201d can be truly unhackable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For starters, Goldberg worries about key discipline: Who has access to the key and what happens when that access is revoked? Could a spurned employee exact revenge? What if the key is lost?Goldberg\u2019s approach is to design networks and systems that follow a \u201cdefense in-depth\u201d model. \u201cIf a malicious actor gets access to one aspect of the system, they don\u2019t immediately have access to everything,\u201d he explains. Sinanoglu acknowledges that, for now, they can only secure their chip at the hardware layer, but when the hardware is compromised, the whole system is compromised \u2014 which is why he considers his team\u2019s latest iteration the unhackable ideal he has been working toward for most of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sinanoglu clearly recalls the day in Izmir when his father, a petroleum engineer, presented him with that ancient 8-bit home computer. His younger brother, Yigit, who works as a product control manager in Switzerland, says Ozgur was glued to the device, and his competitive drive (nurtured by a natural aptitude for sports) pushed him to master every detail. \u201cWhatever he was doing, he wanted to beat the other guys,\u201d Yigit recalls. The \u201cother guys\u201d now in his sights are bad actors in the chip business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n