Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transparency log

Re:Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transp... by ericbarrett on Sunday July 04, 2021 @01:27PM (#27731207)

In my younger days I worked in customer support for a storage company. A customer had one of our products crash (kernel panic) at a sensitive time. We had a couple of crack engineers I used to hover around to try to pick up gdb tricks so I followed this case with interest—it was a new and unexpected panic.

Turns out the crash was caused by the processor taking the wrong branch. Something like this (it wasn’t Intel but you get the picture):

  test edx, edx
  jnz $something_that_expects_nonzero_edx

Well, edx was 0, but the CPU jumped anyway.

So yeah, sometimes ECC isn’t enough. If you’re really paranoid (crypto, milsec) you should execute multiple times and sanity-test.

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Re:Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transp... by astrange on Sunday July 04, 2021 @11:58PM (#27734521)

I saw a kernel panic because of this _yesterday_. (Crash where the failing instruction in memory was 1 bit different from on disk.)

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Re:Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transp... by ericbarrett on Monday July 05, 2021 @01:00AM (#27734757)

Sounds like a regular RAM bitflip, doesn't it?

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Re:Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transp... by astrange on Monday July 05, 2021 @03:54AM (#27735558)

Sure, but even with those you'd usually expect it to happen to data, which is a lot larger.

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