exploiting

Definition

To take advantage of some property — in security papers, a flaw. Titles of the form "Exploiting X to do Y" announce the attack path: what was assumed benign and what it can be turned into. Note the unrelated sense in reinforcement learning, where exploitation means committing to the best known action rather than exploring, and carries no adversarial connotation.

Explainers using this term

• CPU Pipelines and Branch Prediction — The Factory Inside One Clock TickSpectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution