Search Results: HardwareSecurity

A former Xbox 360 engineer reveals a critical CPU design flaw involving speculative execution and a custom prefetch instruction, years before Meltdown and Spectre emerged. This bug, which caused mysterious crashes by violating cache coherency, underscores the enduring risks of performance optimizations in hardware.

A legendary Super Mario 64 speedrun glitch revealed an invisible threat haunting modern computing: cosmic ray bit flips. These rare but catastrophic memory errors—caused by particles from deep space—have altered election results and threaten systems at scale. As data volumes explode, understanding and mitigating these 'single-event upsets' becomes critical for resilient engineering.

On the 20th anniversary of Microsoft's original Xbox, we revisit the critical hardware vulnerability that cracked open its security fortress. Discover how a legacy CPU feature from the 8088 era became the console's Achilles' heel through the A20 gate exploit.