Planned Obsolescence: This software lets computer aging rapidly – ZEIT ONLINE

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1. Page 1 – This software lets computer age rapidly
2. Page 2 – Magic recalls Stuxnet

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Progeria means early aging. The term refers to several rare inherited disorders that cause the human body senile in fast motion. Researchers from New York University have developed a kind of computer progeria.

The software of the team led by Professor Ramesh Karri makes microprocessors not only less efficient, but can they grow so fast that their circuits after a few weeks give up the ghost.

How Cigarettes, whiskey and butter cream cake as a food source for the human body, is also available for computer processors certain inputs that make the degeneration feed. This is exactly what the New York Code of IT specialists.

“With our software called Magic ( Malicious Ageing in Circuits / Cores ) we were able to a commercial processor within one month to the limit of his life bringing” says Arun Karthik Kanuparthi, second author of the study. “Normally, transistors recover from stressful inputs. With our software, we have but this recovery period prevented.”

How the attack works

This Magic acts in the execution phase of the processor that is running in the loaded machine code. Virtually every modern processor machine instructions divided into subtasks that can be processed in parallel with the clock of the processor. Thereafter, the results of the subtasks are combined into an overall result. Because edit as on the production line of a car manufacturer, to the specialized teams in succession individual parts of a vehicle, it is more efficient even with processors, if an object is distributed across different processor sections.

The Magic software now administered as it were the slowest department a month duration noise, and suppresses the fact envisaged recovery phase. They succeeded Karri and his colleagues, to create a kind of electronic cirrhosis in the transistors of a processor, the so-called Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). In this case, the voltage needed to turn on the transistors in the processor from OFF to ON (or zero to one), with time higher. Once the order resulting switching delays exceed a certain value, interrupts the entire processor together.

For normal use of the NBTI effect results only after many years to the fact that a processor is useless. A Magic attack against it manipulates the input of the processor such that each step amplifies the NBTI effect. So the researchers were able to reduce their test attack at the performance of OpenSPARC processor in just one month by around eleven percent and bring it to the brink of collapse.

“The OpenSPARC processor was our object of study, because Oracle has disclosed its architecture,” says Kanuparthi. “With a bit of effort but you can create a Magic Code for each processor type. A colleague of mine has already been successfully tried out Magic on another processor architecture.”

Magic can be used by corporations and consumers

But who would bring such an attack something? In their article provide Karri and his colleagues three possible scenarios.

First, could reduce the performance via software update older devices to provide a special incentive to buy manufacturer just before the release of their new smartphones or laptops. Reliable data on the spread of these “planned obsolescence” does not yet exist but, on the other hand quite concrete individual examples.

Secondly, could shrewd users the manufacturer equal to repay it back with a software like Magic. Who is no longer satisfied with the performance of its hardware during the warranty period, could make his computer or mobile phone with Magic a little electronic euthanasia and require the manufacturer a replacement unit.

“As a third scenario, one can imagine the state sponsored backdoors. The would allow sensitive hardware to destroy, for example, military equipment, which was sold to other countries, should the State dance from the diplomatic row, “says Kanuparthi. “Evidence of such attacks, however, there has not, only guess.” What could be that the researchers of New York University, this possibility have discovered the first civilian scientists.