Playing the song “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson on some older laptops causes a crash. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains why.
According to Raymond Chena “big computer maker” discovered, sometime in the 2000s, that “Rhythm Nation,” a Janet Jackson hit released in 1989, crashed some laptops and crashed a nearby laptop, even if he didn’t play the song.
The reason, says Raymond Chen, is that “Rhythm Nation” contained one of the “natural resonant frequencies” of laptop computers with 5400 rpm hard drives. Luckily, devices that spin at 5400 rpm are only common in older laptops. He heard the story from a colleague working on a Windows XP support issue.
Most laptops today come with solid-state hard drives (SSDs) with no spinning discs, making it safe to play that YouTube music.
A music listed in fault
According to The Register, the bug has now received a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier from MITRE, the US government-backed organization that maintains the CVE system for security bug tracking. He describes CVE-2022-38392 as a denial of service flaw caused by a “resonance frequency attack” via the “Rhythm Nation” music video.
“A certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with portable PCs around 2005, allows attackers who are physically nearby to cause a denial of service (device malfunction and system shutdown) via an attack by resonant frequency with the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video,” says MITER.
As one reader of The Register, “resonance feedback” is a well-known engineering problem and is why soldiers tread water when crossing a bridge. British soldiers marching in unison caused the collapse of the Broughton suspension bridge in 1831 due to mechanical resonance induced by soldiers’ footsteps.
Raymond Chen also mentions the Tacoma Narrows Bridge near Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, which collapsed in 1940 due to high winds. History.com reports that the bridge was vulnerable to vibrations generated by the wind. When the frequency of the oscillations reached a certain point, it collapsed.
The performance of disks comes out damaged
Sound also causes vibrations, and these are known to negatively impact drive performance. Raymond Chen cites a humorous video made in 2009 by famed engineer Brendan Gregg, then working at Sun Microsystems on its Solaris Fishworks analysis software. Brendan Gregg demonstrates what happens to disk performance when your data center administrator, furious at another Java bug, decides to roar at a disk array. His screams measurably increased drive latency and slowed I/O operations. “High latency caused by disk vibrations is a real problem,” concludes Brendan Gregg.
The OEM whose laptops were affected by Janet Jackson’s song circumvented “Rhythm Nation” by including a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detects and removes specific frequencies during audio playback. Raymond Chen wonders if the supplier has thought of removing the filter now that it is no longer of any use.
“And I’m sure they put a digital version of a ‘Do Not Remove’ sticker on that audio filter. (I’m afraid though that in the many years since the workaround was added, no one remembers why it was there. Hopefully their laptops don’t yet carry this audio filter to protect against damage to a hard drive model they no longer use). »
In recent years, researchers have discovered multiple acoustic attacks that can force a processor to leak secrets.
Source : ZDNet.com