Paper copies of important top-secret documents can always be run through the shredder, but what is a person supposed to do if they have to destroy classified data contained on a computer chip? Now, thanks to engineers at Xerox PARC, you can cause it to self-destruct.
While that may sound like something out of a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie, the technology is quite real, and was recently put on display at a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) event held in St. Louis, according to Engadget and Gizmodo.
So how did the PARC team pull off this incredible feat? They started by making the chips out of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, the same type of material used in many smartphones, rather than plastic and metal. However, they modified it to become tempered glass under extreme stress, causing it to shatter and disintegrate on command when triggered by a laser, radio signal, or switch.
At the DARPA event, the engineers outfitted the chips with a small resistor at the bottom which served as its self-destruct mechanism. When this resistor was heated by a laser, the entire chip wound up instantly shattering due to the invisible stress acting upon it. Instead of just shattering once, however, it continued to crumble until all that remained was a pile of dust.
An extreme solution to high-tech security issues
“The applications we are interested in are data security and things like that,” Gregory Whiting, a senior scientist at PARC in Palo Alto, California, said to IDG News Service. “We really wanted to come up with a system that was very rapid and compatible with commercial electronics.”
“We take the glass and we ion-exchange temper it to build in stress,” he added. “What you get is glass that, because it’s heavily stressed, breaks and fragments into tiny little pieces.” By fabricating a chip containing an encryption key or other valuable information on glass, PARC explained that it could ensure the chip’s destruction, perhaps automatically, if it fell into the wrong hands.
Gizmodo called self-destructing chips “an extreme solution” to the issue of high-tech security, but admitted that it was one that “undoubtedly works.” While the technology will likely be used first by the military or government agencies, it could eventually find its way to the consumer market, enabling people to blow-up lost or stolen smartphones when needed.
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Feature Image: Xerox Parc
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