Progeria is a rare genetic disorder that causes symptoms of aging to manifest at an early age. This has been immortalized in films before, somewhat like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." A group of researchers at New York University (NYU) claims to have discovered a digital version of the disease, which can infect smartphones and hasten their demise.
The "digital progeria" can be induced by attacking the smartphone hardware to significantly slow the device and even causing its utter failure.
"Generally when companies manufacture integrated circuits, they are built for a lifetime. When we studied the aging process, we observed it is input dependent. If you run certain programs, you can make the degradation occur faster," Arun Kanuparthi, one of the NYU researchers, said in a published paper. "What we were able to do is create a malicious program that, when you run it on a phone, can crash it in just a month."
The NYU research was purely academic, and it brings forward the issue as to who would want to use a method of killing smartphones with such level of malice. One should remember that most hackers would target smartphones in order to steal data.
One of the suggestions involves the planned obsolescence scenario. Here, phone manufacturers seeking to gain more profit will intentionally torture smartphones with malicious apps so that the owners would have no choice but to upgrade, according to Tech Crunch. Apple, for example, has been accused of this very same planned obsolescence tactic, as reported by The Independent.
There are also other alternative scenarios, which include a government-sponsored hardware backdoor, which entails an attack on hardware sold to a foreign government either to undermine its capability, or force it to buy a new one.
