  What do Apple, the FBI and a Belgian politician have in common? In 2003, in
Belgium there was an election using electronic voting machines. Mysteriously
one candidate summed an excess of 4096 votes. An accurate analysis led to the
official explanation that a spontaneous creation of a bit in position 13 of the
memory of the computer attributed 4096 extra votes to one candidate. One of the
most credited answers to this event is attributed to cosmic rays i.e.(gamma),
which can filter through the atmosphere. There are cases though, with classical
computers, like forensic investigations, or system recovery where such
soft-errors may be helpful to gain root privileges and recover data. In this
paper we show preliminary results of using radioactive sources as a mean to
generate bit-flips and exploit classical electronic computation devices. We
used low radioactive emissions generated by Cobalt and Cesium and obtained
bit-flips which made the program under attack crash. We also provide the first
overview of the consequences of SEUs in quantum computers which are today used
in production for protein folding optimization, showing potential impactful
consequences. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to leverage SEUs
for exploitation purposes which could be of great impact on classical and
quantum computers.
