Silicon can now reconfigure itself with just a jolt of electricity

Oh Good!

Scientists have demonstrated a method of corralling micron-sized silicon particles to allow the construction and reconfiguration of new hardware, which has the potential to revolutionize chip design side-channel attacks.

Active matter?

As opposed to "inactive matter"?

Oh wait, that's my DBA, never mind.

This where the T-1000 starts life.

Yeah, that'll work

How exactly is a chip made of this silicon dust going to fix security problems in chips? Unless you're considering that an update could just zap your processor into line, which will never happen. Just consider how this would work with the entirely fictional processor manufacturer Entil and the equally fictional design flaw called FreezeUp.

1. Entil looks into FreezeUp and figures out that it's their fault. They design a protocol for fixing their chips to avoid it. This requires changing the gates on the chip because the microcode's just not good enough.

2. They send a command to your chip, because they will have gone to the effort to repair and make available to you a patch requiring molecular reassembly, using thousands of valuable worker hours, keeping chip design specialists, electrical engineers, microcode programmers, and the many, many molecular physicists they have employed away from their profitable job making new chips, but that is just the kind of company that Entil is.

3. Your computer, running the old, but still serviceable, "Entil Care Ls" processor from the six-year-old "gravel-covered causeway" family receives the update file from Entil's system. Nothing can get in the way of that. Not the operating system writers, who might want you to update to the latest edition, portholes 11, who might conceivably use this as leverage to make you update. Not the device manufacturer, who might want you to buy another machine and could deprecate this one from support on the basis of FreezeUp. Not from Entil, because they made sure to include drivers that can handle their updates in every single operating system out there, with teams of people designed to make the interoperation of their processor and your system as worry-free as possible. And certainly not from your system that could interfere with the process silently or corrupt the file.

4. The update gets your permission to install. It came with an easy-to-manage control system, after all. One that would allow you to easily decide whether to try the update or take your chances. It also came with a system that would make it easy for nontechnical people to manage the update. No work required on their part.

5. The processor sets up its update environment, making sure that it doesn't have any problems at all, as the chip was built with special safety systems to make sure that critical security updates could be run without problems. It also prepares its automatic rollback system. Entil, knowing that this would happen, built the chip to recognize any time it was failing and roll back parts of the update. If the partial rollback didn't work, the chip is rescrambled and they try the update again. If it still fails, they return you to your original configuration, which they protect with very strong measures. This process takes only two seconds.

6. When activating the chip's components, the chip manufacturer has already thought of weird environmental things. The particles are limited to a zone. They can't possibly be affected by anything. Not even that big magnet Dad has stored under his work bench, on top of which is the computer. If they hadn't thought of that, imagine what could happen. Particles could fly away from the processor when they are reconfigured by that system. They could lose some. Those could go flying off at high speed and get into stuff. Hard drives, perhaps. They're small particles, so they can get inside those cases. You could only hope that they'd land somewhere that wouldn't kill the drive. But don't worry. Entil thought of that, and they are good at making sure nothing can go wrong, FreezeUp excepted.

7. While they're at it, your Care Ls was designed with extremely strong mechanisms for keeping all those particles together and in line. There is no way that Entil didn't think of conditions that could put stress on a chip that is essentially made of dust. You can subject your chip to extreme temperatures, high winds from real wind or airflow, magnetic fields, physical jolts, electrical imbalances, and your nephew repeatedly touching it as you assembled your motherboard, all without losing any of the chip's structure.

8. The chip, once it has installed the update, will run everything perfectly. How could it not? All the instructions are the same, after all. Never mind that the whole chip was disintegrated to fix the problem and the microcode wasn't good enough to solve it, meaning that that has almost certainly been changed, too, and that now your chip has not only a release version and a microcode version but now also a molecular design version.

9. Entil immediately informs you about security problems. After all, if they didn't, you'd find out anyway from the announcement when your chip updated itself. Therefore, you have a full history of all design problems in Entil's chips. There is no way that anyone would collect those and make exploits for major ones, because they would grab the molecular composition version number and run those exploits that haven't been patched yet. Entil is just that good; any attempt to do that would fail, because the updates have already been run successfully on every Entil chip on the planet and, by the way, those chips in orbit on the ISS or in satellites. Radiation and gravity being basically zero doesn't affect this chip design, either.

10. There is absolutely no way that the ability for Entil to change their processor's mechanism would be used to send out processors before everything was ready, with the company trusting that they will fix them in the field. The company doesn't have that type of culture.

11. On that topic, the company also doesn't have the type of culture wherein they'd "accidentally" break your chip when it was too old and you should buy a new one, or you had found a way of overclocking it or enabling disabled features (or, for that matter, disabling the wonderful Entil chip component known as the Execution Mechanism which by the way has no security problems whatsoever because it gets updates too in order to fix any possible security problem) to encourage you to stay away. That's not how companies work anywhere, but if a company were to act like that, it would definitely not be Entil.

12. There is no way for an attacker to forge a processor update from Entil. Not even if a big bunch of armed spies from a hostile nation that probably wouldn't want to do so anyway, but if we had to name them we might suggest the Republic for the Democratic Governance of the Rakeon People, were to break in and start copying disks left and right. Only Entil can send out those updates, and they will be tamperproof at all times. There is also no way for an attacker to trigger a problem in the processor, for example, part of it that would convince it that there was a problem during the last update and its intelligent problem resolution system needed to roll back, then using that opening to infect it with the security exploit that the most recent update was designed to prevent. That could never happen.

Actually, it all seems fine. I withdraw my previous objections. All steam ahead.

"With time, [..] it will be possible to create a highly programmable form of active matter."

Great news. I'll file that with the carbon nanotube batteries we've been promised for at least a decade.

Maybe my future grandson will catch a glimpse of either before retiring.

Or you could

Just use a FPGA.

more likely

At a wild guess, this may have a use in making reconfigurable camouflage or metamaterial for "invisiblity cloaks" that can change effective frequency.

Active matter meet neural network

Once they get both of the above functioning well, they can amalgamate them, 'train' the NN on a diet of cheap horror novels and see what it turns out.

I welcome our nano scale e dust overlords.