The console uses a Tegra X1 processor which had an important mode where the device would enter into ‘RCM’ or ‘Recovery Mode’ and was designed to run low level executables before the rest of the system loads (like the Operating System). This mode was meant to be used by NVIDIA employees as a USB-based rescue mode that would flash the Tegra devices and recover bricked devices. Nvidia did attempt to put some protections in place to prevent unverified code to be executed by checking the binary is signed before execution.

However, the protection was poorly designed and could be bypassed by overwhelming the system with data, effectively confusing the system to run the binary anyway without checking. This bug helped make arbitrary code execution possible on the Nintendo Switch!