Search for exotic phenomena at CMS

Signs of physics beyond the Standard Model are widely searched for in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We review results of exotic physics searches based on 20 fb$^{-1}$ of data collected in 2012 by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. Selected benchmark analyses are presented, including searches in topologies with leptons, photons and jets, as well as a description of techniques to identify the production of exotic objects such as massive long-lived charged particles. No statistically-significant excess of events is observed in the data, therefore results are presented in terms of exclusion limits on the mass and the production cross section of hypothetical particles.