Deja-Vu: A Glimpse on Radioactive Soft-Error Consequences on Classical and Quantum Computations

Abstract

What do Apple, the FBI and a Belgian politician have in common? In 2003, in Belgium there was an election using electronic voting machines. Mysteriously one candidate summed an excess of 4096 votes. An accurate analysis led to the official explanation that a spontaneous creation of a bit in position 13 of the memory of the computer attributed 4096 extra votes to one candidate. One of the most credited answers to this event is attributed to cosmic rays i.e.(gamma), which can filter through the atmosphere. Indeed, SEUs (single event upsets) such as bit-flips are frequent faults especially in outer space, where ionizing radiations are very frequent. For this reason many space capable devices mount very expensive and technically advanced memories, to reduce risks of malfunction, breakage, or exploit. On the other hand, at ground level, consumer devices aren't equipped with such memories for economic and statistical reasons. Indeed, research in the area shows that cosmic, highenergy rays filter inside the atmosphere on a daily basis. But when they hit our computers mostly they reach non-allocated space and systems do not notice their effects. There are cases though, with classical computers, like forensic investigations, or system recovery where such soft-errors may be helpful to gain root privileges and recover data. In this paper we show preliminary results of using radioactive sources as a mean to generate bit-flips and exploit classical electronic computation devices. We used low radioactive emissions generated by Cobalt and Cesium and obtained bit-flips which made the program under attack crash. We also provide the first overview of the consequences of SEUs in quantum computers which are today used in production for protein folding optimization, showing potential impactful consequences. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to leverage SEUs for exploitation purposes which could be of great impact on classical and quantum computers.