What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
blog.mozilla.org
What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#2I worked at Sonus Networks (now Ribbon[0]) in the early 2000's building VoIP solutions for telcos. We had a bunch of unexplained errors in a new installation in Denver. After much head scratching the engineers on the problem concluded that the higher altitude significantly increased the likelihood of impact by alpha particles and that that was the cause of the problem!
(IIRC we increased the shielding on the devices.)
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#3I worked at Sonus Networks (now Ribbon[0]) in the early 2000's building VoIP solutions for telcos. We had a bunch of unexplained errors in a new installation in Denver. After much head scratching the engineers on the problem concluded that the higher altitude significantly increased the likelihood of impact by alpha particles and that that was the cause of the problem! (IIRC we increased the shielding on the devices.…
Maybe it's a stupid question, but did the additional shielding completely resolve the discrepancy?
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#4This is fascinating and hints at a future possible scientific study: using phones across the globe to map cosmic ray events. I'm not a physicist so I can't speak for the value of such data. If cosmic ray events do not occur uniformly across the globe then mapping events from 100,000s of phones could give interesting insights.
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#5"Bitsquatting is a form of cybersquatting which relies on bit-flip errors that occur during the process of making a DNS request. These bit-flips may occur due to factors such as faulty hardware or cosmic rays. When such an error occurs, the user requesting the domain may be directed to a website registered under a domain name similar to a legitimate domain, except with one bit flipped in their respective binary representations.
"A 2011 Black Hat paper detailed an analysis where eight legitimate domains were targeted with thirty one bitsquat domains. Over the course of one day, 3,434 requests were made to bitsquat domains." [1]
Cisco presented a paper on bitsquatting at defcon, "Examining the Bitsquatting Attack Surface". From the paper, "The conclusion is that the possibility of bitsquat attacks is more widespread than originally thought, but several techniques exist for mitigating the effects of these new attacks." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting
[2] https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2021/DEF%20CON%2021%20pre...
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#6This is fascinating and hints at a future possible scientific study: using phones across the globe to map cosmic ray events. I'm not a physicist so I can't speak for the value of such data. If cosmic ray events do not occur uniformly across the globe then mapping events from 100,000s of phones could give interesting insights.
As they say, there's an app for that:
Basically it monitors your camera for the streaks produced by cosmic rays. You can see the real time stream of events here:
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#7Any sort of hardware or software error seems much more likely. Computers are incredibly complex and approximations are used everywhere (in the design of the hardware, in the theory of operation). I don't think inference-based experiments or analysis on cosmic ray bit flips are appropriate.
You really need some kind of dedicated cosmic ray detector nearby as a control. If the flux of cosmic rays into the detector is orders of magnitude lower than the rate of bit errors you ascribe to cosmic rays, it's probably some hardware/software issue and not the cosmic rays.
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#8This is fascinating and hints at a future possible scientific study: using phones across the globe to map cosmic ray events. I'm not a physicist so I can't speak for the value of such data. If cosmic ray events do not occur uniformly across the globe then mapping events from 100,000s of phones could give interesting insights.
As they say, there's an app for that: https://cosmicrayapp.com/ Basically it monitors your camera for the streaks produced by cosmic rays. You can see the real time stream of events here: https://cosmicrayobserver.com/#0.4/0/0
Wait, this works? That's amazing. I suppose you could do the same with any camera sensor?
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#9I worked at Sonus Networks (now Ribbon[0]) in the early 2000's building VoIP solutions for telcos. We had a bunch of unexplained errors in a new installation in Denver. After much head scratching the engineers on the problem concluded that the higher altitude significantly increased the likelihood of impact by alpha particles and that that was the cause of the problem! (IIRC we increased the shielding on the devices.…
Minor clarification: alpha radiation doesn't come from cosmic rays, rather from U/Th contamination in the circuit materials. The altitude dependent component you'd be seeing is rather muons and neutrons.
Re: What Flips Your Bit: Cosmic Ray Errors at Mozilla
#10This is fascinating and hints at a future possible scientific study: using phones across the globe to map cosmic ray events. I'm not a physicist so I can't speak for the value of such data. If cosmic ray events do not occur uniformly across the globe then mapping events from 100,000s of phones could give interesting insights.
As they say, there's an app for that: https://cosmicrayapp.com/ Basically it monitors your camera for the streaks produced by cosmic rays. You can see the real time stream of events here: https://cosmicrayobserver.com/#0.4/0/0
Looks like the rays only hit populated areas. https://xkcd.com/1138/