Every time a malicious program—say, a script on a website you visit—runs a certain, obscure command, that capacitor cell “steals” a tiny amount of electric charge and stores it in the cell’s wires without otherwise affecting the chip’s functions. With every repetition of that command, the capacitor gains a little more charge. Only after the “trigger” command is sent many thousands of times does that charge hit a threshold where the cell switches on a logical function in the processor to give a malicious program the full operating system access it wasn’t intended to have. “It takes an attacker doing these strange, infrequent events in high frequency for a duration of time,” says Austin. “And then finally the system shifts into a privileged state that lets the attacker do whatever they want.”