Sometimes users take advantage of the unintended or undocumented operation of hardware to serve some purpose, in which case a flaw may be considered a feature.
This gives rise to the often ironically employed acronym INABIAF, "It's Not A Bug It's A Feature".
Some flaws in hardware may lead to security vulnerabilities where memory protection or other features fail to work properly.
Starting in 2017 a series of security vulnerabilities were found in the implementations of speculative execution on common processor architectures that allowed a violation of privilege level.
In 2019 researchers discovered that a manufacturer debugging mode, known as VISA, had an undocumented feature on Intel Platform Controller Hubs, known as chipsets, which made the mode accessible with a normal motherboard possibly leading to a security vulnerability.