I read this for some work I did a few months ago. It's a very interesting idea to try to uncover a computer within a computer. It reminds me of the Atari 2600 emulators in Minecraft [1], or things like using bitwise operators to compute and write arbitrary data to memory as is done in the Pegasus/NSO exploit [2]. But I think the literature does not necessarily imply that these "weird machines" are Turing complete or capable of much; they are more general. From my understanding weird machines are some sort of FSM of unintended/weird states in a program with various transitions to go from weird state to weird state. The use is to be able to construct a weird machine with enough states and transitions to get a program to a vulnerable state where it can be exploited. Getting something like this with micro-architectural weird machines, the Pegasus exploit, etc. is of course much harder, and more valuable. It will also be interesting to see if the theory behind weird machines becomes used for automated exploit generation in the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq7T5_xH24M

[2] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...