M1 Chip Vulnerability

2022-06-15 11:05

This is a new vulnerability against Apple's M1 chip.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature.

The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.

The attack, appropriately called "Pacman," works by "Guessing" a pointer authentication code, a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn't been maliciously altered.

It's not obvious how to exploit this vulnerability in the wild, so I'm unsure how important this is.

I don't know if it also applies to Apple's new M2 chip.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/06/m1-chip-vulnerability.html

#chip #vulnerability