Undetectable proof-of-concept chip poisoning uses analog circuits to escalate privilege

In A2: Analog Malicious Hardware, a paper given at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, a group of researchers from the University of Michigan detail a novel, frightening attack on the integrity of microprocessors that uses nearly undetectable tampering, late in the manufacturing process, to allow attackers to trip the "privilege" bit on the chip from userspace processes. (more")