Apple Silicon: there is a flaw but do not worry!

A microarchitecture flaw would have been detected by Illinois researchers at Urbana Champaign and Washington on Apple Silicon

Apple Silicon would be at the center of a media “leak”. To find out the researchers of the University of Illinois a Urbana Champaign e of the University of Washingtonthe chips of the manufacturer of the bitten apple would be studying an architectural flaw in the processors produced by ARM.

The culprit would be the use by these architecture to exploit a particular prefetcher system, which we remember to be the system for optimizing the start-up and loading time of programs, this system would lead to data leaks in the system. Here are the details.

Apple Silicon: there is a flaw but do not worry!

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Washington warn, however, that the possibility of it being exploited by direct attacks is far from now.

The flaw was baptized with the name Augury and as anticipated it would be present at the departmental level Data-Memory Dependent Prefetcher (DMP). Structural area that deals with implementing the act of prefetching and optimizing performance, that is the ability to retrieve instructions (or specific data) in advance (a bit like it happens with the latest versions of operating systems in recent years, even Android) , in order to improve performance. The process may expose some data too much though, the DMP process could read and transmit some memory values ​​outside the sandbox, therefore outside a safe area with a watertight compartment.

We found a way to leak data on Apple Silicon processors that is “at rest”: that is, data the core never reads speculatively or non-speculatively.
This will be an odd one, so stick around for the 🧵 and see https://t.co/KCnw9PAlSS

— David Kohlbrenner (@dkohlbre) April 29, 2022

According to the researchers, however, the DMP would only release certain types of values, which would be a very long and winding road to be exploited, but not impossible. “Prefetchers only look at the stream of previous addresses accessed. DMPs also consider the content of previously loaded memory differently. Intrinsically, the choice of the DMP therefore reveals something about the content of the memory ”, thus some researchers of the Team explained the complex situation.

Apple has not officially spoken at the moment, but the idea suggested by the developers is not to let your guard down, and try to contain the problem via software. If you want to continue to know the latest news from the software world, keep following us. Greetings from TechGameWorld.com.