Security paper shows how application can steal CPU cycles

The annual Usenix security symposium is a gathering place for all kinds of ideas: those on how to stop security flaws and those about what kinds of new security issues may emerge in the future. A neat example of the latter was presented by Dan Tsafrir, Yoav Etsion, and Dror G. Feitelson in their paper (PDF) entitled "Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Superuser Privileges." The team presented a proof-of-concept program for Unix-based systems—although it could theoretically be adopted for any modern multitasking operating system—that allows a specified task to "cheat" and take more CPU cycles than the OS would normally allow it to have.

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