A rare genetic disorder called progeria that causes symptoms of old age to manifest in the young has been popularized in books and movies such asJack, a film that featured Robin Williams as a boy who aged four times faster than normal, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a story said to be inspired by the disorder. Researchers at NYU have published a paper showing how to infect devices such as smartphones with the digital version of the disease.
In a paper titled “MAGIC: Malicious Aging in Circuits/Cores,” NYU computer scientists lay out a series of methods to attack hardware by aging integrated circuits rapidly and causing them to wear out. The effects of such an attack on a smartphone, for instance, couldinclude slow performance or even failure of the device.
“Generally when companies manufacture integrated circuits, they are built for a lifetime. When we studied the aging process, we observed it is input dependent. If you run certain programs, you can make the degradation occur faster,” said Arun Kanuparthi, one of the authors of the paper at NYU. “What we were able to do is create a malicious program that, when you run it on a phone, can crash it in just a month.”
Why would anyone want to do that? There are many reasons that consumers — or even companies — might try to use such software to kill devices.
The first scenario the paper describes is the warranty scenario. “Let’s say you just bought a new phone,” says Kanuparthi, “and the company that manufactures that phone announces that they are launching a new model. You want that new phone, so you download this malicious app, run it on yourphone, say that it is broken, and trade it in for the new model.” Essentially, the software tortures the chip to death. “Think of it this way,” says Kanuparthi. “If you eat too many cheesy puffs and drink a lot of soda, what happens to you? We essentially put the transistors in the integrated circuit under a lot of stress by force feeding them.”