How Carefully Timed CPU Failures Can Create Security Risks

Summary

A researcher explains how carefully induced CPU failures can trigger machine check exceptions and expose security risks in privileged handler code. The discussion also notes that secure source code may not produce a secure binary.

Key points

• The speaker describes machine check exceptions as emergency handlers triggered by serious CPU errors.
• Overheating a CPU or causing another catastrophic failure may trigger an exception; timing it carefully could create an opportunity to exploit the CPU.
• The discussion highlights security properties in the privileged code executed by the machine check handler.
• The interviewer and guest note that a compiler transforms source code into the binary that actually runs, so secure-looking source code alone does not guarantee a secure result.