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OP here. Unless you work for a certificate authority or a web browser, this event will have zero impact on you. While this particular CT log has failed, there
by agwa 5y ago
OP here. Unless you work for a certificate authority or a web browser, this event will have zero impact on you. While this particular CT log has failed, there are many other CT logs, and certificates are required to be logged to 2-3 different logs (depending on certificate lifetime) so that if a log fails web browsers can rely on one of the other logs to ensure the certificate is publicly logged.
This is the 8th log to fail (although the first caused by a bit flip), and log failure has never caused a user-facing certificate error. The overall CT ecosystem has proven very resilient, even if a bit flip can take out an individual log.
(P.S. No one knows if it was really a cosmic ray or not. But it's almost certainly a random hardware error rather than a software bug, and cosmic ray is just the informal term people like to use for unexplained hardware bit flips.)
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIs it possible to give an example other than “cosmic ray”? I know it’s an informal short hand, but it also raises the question of what’s actually causing these flips. Is it just random stray electrons that happen to stray too far while traveling through the RAM? Very interesting to me.
- DominoTree 5y agoOld DRAM/SRAM simply becoming flaky, overheating, physical connection issues, faulty power - there are a ton of reasons these flips happen, and I would think that in most cases they are entirely unnoticed or simply observed as an application crashing, rather than being recognized as directly caused by bit flips.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoNot for specific bit flips, but on average you get more bit flips at higher altitudes and on systems with less shielding (being underground helps).