New Vulnerability on Apple Silicon Chips

According to Digitaltrendsresearchers Jose Rodrigo Sanchez Vicarte from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Michael Flanders of the University of Washington published their findings about a flaw in Apple Silicon. The vulnerability itself stems from a flaw in Apple’s implementation of the Data-Memory Dependent Prefetcher (DMP) feature.

Apple Silicon’s M1 chip is on the list of security holes reuters

A DMP looks at memory to determine what to prefetch for the CPU. The researchers discovered the chip M1, Apple’s M1 Max and A14 use the array of pointers pattern, which will iterate over an array and skip the contents. That is the reason for the vulnerability on these processor chips.

David Kohlbrenner, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, downplayed the impact of the Augery vulnerability, noting that Apple’s DMP “is the weakest DMP an attacker can get”.

Currently, the researchers say the “pointers” can only be accessed through the sandbox environment – an independent testing environment – to study the vulnerability. Apple also received notice of the vulnerability before it was made public, so a patch is likely to be rolled out soon.

It is known that Apple has released the March 2022 security patch for macOS Monterey to fix some nasty Bluetooth and display bugs. The company also patched two vulnerabilities that allowed apps to execute code with kernel-level privileges. Other important fixes for Apple’s PC operating system include a patch for a security vulnerability that exposes browsing data in the browser. Safari.

Finding faults in the hardware of Apple sometimes quite large bonuses can be obtained. A student from the Academy Technology Georgia (USA) once found a major vulnerability that allowed unauthorized access to the webcam, and this helped him receive a bonus worth about $ 100,000 from Apple.