System call security risks

System calls are not without their security risks. Even on modern hardware, and using CPU architectures other than Intel, executing more than one process within an operating system with full isolation between processes is nearly impossible.

Although modern hardware and modern operating systems work hard to provide the best possible isolation and security, it should always be assumed that other, malicious processes executing alongside yours may be able to spy on what you're doing, including sensitive tasks such as decrypting user data.

This is another topic that deserves its own book, but here, we will briefly discuss two different, recent security vulnerabilities that affect system programming.