https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s01-hochschild.pdf
TLDR;
Google researchers have published a paper describing what they call “mercurial” cores. Mercurial cores are cores that are subject to what Google calls “corrupt execution errors,” or CEEs. One critical component of CEEs is that they are silent..
“We expect CPUs to fail in some noticeable way when they miscalculate a value, whether that results in an OS reboot, application crash, error message, or garbled output. That does not happen in these cases. CEEs are symptoms of what Google calls “silent data corruption,” or the ability for data to become corrupted when written, read, or at rest without the corruption being immediately detected.”
Testing was done on CPU’s with 8 to 64 cores on new smaller processes. No determinable pattern was found, Google is asking AMD and Intel to step up internal testing.
intentionally using these broken cores however they were able to generate encryptions that could only be decrypted by that individual faulty CPU that encrypted the data which they state is both exciting and terrifying.
TLDR;
Google researchers have published a paper describing what they call “mercurial” cores. Mercurial cores are cores that are subject to what Google calls “corrupt execution errors,” or CEEs. One critical component of CEEs is that they are silent..
“We expect CPUs to fail in some noticeable way when they miscalculate a value, whether that results in an OS reboot, application crash, error message, or garbled output. That does not happen in these cases. CEEs are symptoms of what Google calls “silent data corruption,” or the ability for data to become corrupted when written, read, or at rest without the corruption being immediately detected.”
Testing was done on CPU’s with 8 to 64 cores on new smaller processes. No determinable pattern was found, Google is asking AMD and Intel to step up internal testing.
intentionally using these broken cores however they were able to generate encryptions that could only be decrypted by that individual faulty CPU that encrypted the data which they state is both exciting and terrifying.