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On the TV show Mission: Impossible, the tape with mission instructions always self-destructed, sometimes crumbling and sometimes going up in smoke.
The US military now wants that to happen in real life with electronics that shatter and turn to dust on command.
As the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Microsystems Technology Office describes it, the so-called Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program seeks to develop transient electronics that can physically disappear in a controlled, triggerable manner.
DARPA late last month awarded a $2.1 million contract to PARC and a $3.4 million contract to IBM for the VAPR program.
It’s got obvious appeal for keeping sensitive technology out of the hands of enemies, but DARPA also sees it as having potential applications for use within the human body.
In medical applications, such transient electronics might work as sensors. As they break down into material that could be absorbed by the body, they could also be used in treatment and continuous monitoring.
By the way, just because we don’t often have an excuse to talk about cuttlefish on Naked Security, it should be pointed out that VAPR isn’t the first program to look at electronics that could be absorbed by the human body.
A Carnegie Mellon University team has developed new biological batteries that use cuttlefish ink to create edible, safe batteries for medical applications.
But back to fine piles of dust on the battlefield: in order to achieve dust that would be useless to the enemy, given that it couldn’t be re-engineered, IBM plans to use strained glass substrates that will shatter and thereby reduce attached chips into silicon powder.
The trigger for the shattering might be a fuse or a reactive metal layer that’s activated by a radio signal.
PARC will be working with stress-engineered materials, silicon processing, and microchip handling and deposition to create a transience technology it’s calling Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger, or DUST.
PARC says the end result will be small, sand-like particles that would be too fine to see with the naked eye and should thereby blend into the surrounding environment.
Without the ability to make their gadgets vanish, DARPA officials say it’s close to impossible to track and recover every electronic device on the battlefield.
Alicia Jackson, the VAPR program manager at DARPA, said that these types of transient electronics should help.
Military & Aerospace Electronics quotes her:
DARPA is looking for a way to make electronics that last precisely as long as they are needed. The breakdown of such devices could be triggered by a signal sent from command or any number of possible environmental conditions, such as temperature.
Devices going “poof!” on command is a great idea. It would be nice if data itself had a self-destruct sequence.
Ideally, it would be like SnapChat, purveyor of the supposedly vanishing photos service, but different in that it would actually make things disappear.
If you have proposals for incorporating cuttlefish ink as a medium for storage of personally identifiable information or for the posting of Facebook messages or sexting, please let us know about it in the comments section below.
Image of exploding globe courtesy of Shutterstock.
There have been many times that I have wished I had a “kill” switch for an email I had just sent.
I have worked in computers for almost 20 years, and there is time when all you can say is Oops! I would hate to, by accident, melt my new hardware. Now in the movies the self-destruct button is covered or hidden. But with computers thing happen, and it is never your fault, but it did go wrong somehow.
I would be very surprised if they didn’t have that technology already, and really I doubt that anything left behind is any use to the Jihad’s, but there will be something else behind it, because the military wouldn’t tell what they are trying to do in case someone else beats them to it. So what are they up to I wonder?
Will be interesting if someone else works out the radio frequency, blast the enemy with the right one and watch all of there electronics fail
Agree to Joshua: Self-destruction bears the risk of destruction by someone else. Will it be password protected? Will it be a password as safe as those for the missiles in the 80s?
Agree to David: Self-destruction may be triggered also by an error. Who will read carefully the pop-up-windows “Do you really want to self-destruct the following items: … If Yes, press Confirm. If No press Cancel” ?
BTW: Strained class can self-destruct completely if you add too much strain from outside: temperature change, abrupt movements etc.
Looks like this is a nice implementation to self-destruct 2.1+3.4=5.6 million greenbacks.