So that perspective is largely a risk management failure. Yes, it's possible and probably likely, that at some point a rogue cosmic ray might flip a bit on your phone (or a bit in transit between a tower and your phone).
No, it is exceedingly unlikely that such a bit flip will have a real world impact beyond an unexpected error that manifests as an application crash or device reboot in the worst scenario, and most likely a temporary failure such as an image not loading or rendering, or a decryption operation that fails because the flipped bit makes is treated as an error.
Is it something to be concerned about? Generally not - if you are in an environment that has sufficient radiation that it has a practical impact on your phone, one would hope that your actual concern is more heavily focused on protecting your physical self, and one would hope that your personal threat model increases in scope to justify spending on electronics that are more resilient if you have budget left over after buying protective gear.
Are there any means to detect that a cosmic ray caused such a crash without ECC memory? I recall that Drop Box had some issues early on with memory corruption due to how many low-end PCs ran Drop Box.
I recall coming across a more detailed write up a long time ago but still found mention of the issue [0]
> our clients rarely have ECC memory. We see a constant rate of memory corruption in the wild and end-to-end integrity verification always pays off.
To detect cosmic rays? I doubt it; detecting them would be possible, but pointless since you couldn't reasonably act on the information - any such solution would probably need Heisenberg compensators since the tools to detect the radiation would most interfere with the radiation you are trying to detect. It's probably better to just shield all the things, or add integrity checks everywhere.
To detect bitflipping errors? Yes. Use cryptographically secure algorithms and protocols that ensure that messages have integrity checks in transit and in memory.
To detect crashes? Probably not - if a bit flips in memory without hardware level error correction that reports the error, there isn't really a way to detect what caused the error.
Because its cool. Am I not allowed to want something because I think its neat? I don't need night vision goggles either but man it would be cool to walk around in the woods at night with them on and star gaze.
