Intel x86 isn't self synchonizing. In theory you have to decode every byte of the instruction stream that came before to be sure where the boundaries of an ins

Intel x86 isn't self synchonizing. In theory you have to decode every byte of the instruction stream that came before to be sure where the boundaries of an instruction are. Normally it stabilizes after a while in real world instruction streams but you can craft malicious instruction streams which yield two different valid sets of instructions depending on whether you start reading them at an offset or not. Contrast that to something like utf8 where that isn't possible.