"Smart Chip Senses, Stores, Computes and Secures Data in One Low-Power Platform"

Researchers at Penn State developed a smart hardware platform or chip to mitigate energy consumption while bolstering security. Although software-based security modules are powerful, they have a number of limitations, so the researchers created a cryptographic platform using a two-dimensional material to overcome those security constraints. According to the researchers, silicon, which is frequently used to produce transistors implemented in cellphones, would not work to build a transistor small enough to save on energy use. To make a low-power cryptography chip, they instead used 2D materials, namely molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which is less than one nanometer thick. The MoS2 required to make the chip was synthesized by Penn State collaborators. To encrypt data, the chip employs 320 MoS2 transistors, each with a sensing unit, a storage unit, and a computing unit. The researchers used Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to analyze output patterns and forecast input data in order to test the effectiveness of the encryption process. They discovered that the sophisticated ML methods were unable to decode the encrypted information, further demonstrating the encryption process' resistance to ML attacks. Decoding the information without prior knowledge of the information channels and decoding variables is challenging. This article continues to discuss the Penn State researchers' creation of a low-power cryptographic chip that is less than one nanometer thick using MoS2.  

Penn State reports "Smart Chip Senses, Stores, Computes and Secures Data in One Low-Power Platform"