Technology
Weird Mistake: A song by Janet Jackson kills hard drives even if it’s not on them
With “Rhythm Nation” Janet Jackson landed a big hit in 1989 – now a special feature of the song has become known
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A song more than 30 years old can crash hard drives. Janet Jackson’s hit “Rhythm Nation” is now the first song to be officially recognized as a security hole.
She was the second biggest solo star from the musically talented Jackson family: Janet Jackson. She had great success with songs like “That’s the Way Love Goes” in the 80s and 90s. Even if she never reached the status of her brother Michael, she knew the whole world at least since Nipplegate. Now it has a world premiere: “Rhythm Nation” is the first song to be officially listed as a security problem.
Because the song has amazing capabilities, programmer Raymon Chen reports in a recent entry on Microsoft’s developer blog. If the song is played, it can cause hard drives of various notebook models to crash. The crazy thing is that it even works if the affected notebook is just near the sound source – it is not necessary to save the song on it. The manufacturer was now trying desperately to find out the reason for this.
Dangerous frequency
“I didn’t want to be in the lab during that time,” Chen jokes. And makes it clear: “This is not an artistic evaluation.” The unnamed manufacturer had initially only identified one model that was affected by the vulnerability. It was only discovered in the laboratory that models from the competition were also affected. They just couldn’t find the exact cause. It took them a while to discover why: the song contains a natural resonant frequency that interfered with the hard drive. And that caused them to crash.
In such a phenomenon, a vibration encountered with an object having a similar frequency excites an amplification of the vibration. The effect is the same as that by which a glass can be destroyed by a sound. Such “resonance catastrophes” have also been observed in buildings, and protective measures against them are now being installed during construction.
A filter as a solution
The discoverers also finally found a solution for the hard drive: an audio filter set up by software removes the corresponding frequency from the audio output and thus prevents failure. With modern hard drives, however, this is no longer necessary either: Models from 2005 were apparently particularly affected. Since then, many devices have either used a higher frequency, around 7200 rpm, or do without them completely as “Solid State Drives” (SSD). the moving parts inside.
In the CVE database, the song is now listed as a security problem with an error number. Under the number CVE-2022-38392, the error is described there as a possible type of attack “using the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video”.