Xerox PARC and DARPA have developed a new self-destructing computer that would turn the chips made out of the Gorilla Glass into small pieces. The logic behind is that these glasses are made with high stress and so are not prone to scratches, but apparently, a triggered pressure can make them vanish and turn into hundreds of pieces. This project is currently being developed as part of DARPA’s Vanishing Programmable Resources.
It is similar to the way tampered glasses break, stress is applied to a particular point, and the entire glass just falls into the pieces. During the demonstration, a chip was designed on the glass and with a laser pointing at it shattered the whole circuitry into little pieces. Not much of information is available about where the DARPA will be using such products; we can assume it to hold the secret key combinations, hardware secrets, and cryptography methods to encrypt and decrypt the data.
Other than that, the future developments can also feature the entire computer based on the principles of this new invention. Let’s just assume you have a secret project on a computer that somehow got lost. With the DARPA’s project, it would be possible to destroy it in just a few seconds.
We often use encryption to protect our hard drives, and several operating systems and tools provide hardware and software level encryption for the peripherals and devices. Just like this project, one Linux distribution featuring tools only for the security experts features a NUKE method to destroy everything on an HDD whenever an unauthorized access is attempted.
We live in the world where is everything is being stored in the form of bits and bytes. Whether it is a usual photograph or the top secret nuclear launch codes, everything stays on a computer hard drive, and apparently, no security system ever built is 100 percent secure. Even if you bury a computer 20 feet below the ground, it is still vulnerable.
Now in such scenarios, destroying is the best technique security personnel can apply. Destruction will help the data from not landing in the wrong hands.
