Known as Morpheus, the puzzling processor has now aced its first major tests, repelling hundreds of professional hackers in a DARPA security challenge.

In 2017, DARPA backed the University of Michigan's Morpheus project with US$3.6 million in funding, and now the novel processor has been put to the test. Over four months in 2020, DARPA ran a bug bounty program called Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT), pitting 525 professional security researchers against Morpheus and a range of other processors.

The goal of the program was to test new hardware-based security systems, which could protect data no matter how vulnerable the underlying software was. Morpheus was mocked up to resemble a medical database, complete with software vulnerabilities – and yet, not a single attack made it through its defenses.