PACMAN danger on M1s: chip vulnerability discovered

From the various tests on Apple chips, a new vulnerability has emerged. Indeed, the PACMAN danger has arisen on the M1s

I chip Apple M1 they are part of the family Apple Silicon. This represents a new transition to Arm with new power and performance goals for Apple devices (for more information on the company click here). Part of building a processor is designing its security enclave, and today we have evidence that i M1 processors have a new vulnerability.

Let’s talk about PACMANthat is a hardware attack capable of bypassing pointer authentication (PAC) on M1 processors. Security researchers took an existing concept of Spectre and its application in the x86 realm and have now applied it to Apple’s Arm-based silicon. Indeed PACMAN exploits a software bug current to bypass pointer authentication, which can lead to arbitrary code execution.

What the PACMAN danger entails on the M1s

Vulnerability is a co-design hardware/software which exploits the construction of microarchitecture to execute arbitrary codes. PACMAN creates a Oracle PAC to check if a specific pointer matches its authentication. It should never crash if a wrong guess is given. The attack brutally forces all possible CAP values using Oracle PAC.

To suppress crashes, PAC oracles are provided speculatively. Instead, to find out if the PAC value was correct, the researchers used lateral channeling uArch. In fact, in the CPU reside i translation lookaside buffer (TLB), in cui PACMAN tries to load the pointer speculatively and to verify success using the prime + probe technique. TLBs are filled with minimum addresses required to provide a particular TLB section. If any of these addresses are removed from the TLB, it is likely that the upload was successful and the bugs can take over with a falsely authenticated memory address.

And what do you think of this PACMAN danger on the M1s? tell us yours below in the comments and stay connected on TechGameWorld.com, for the latest news from the world of technology (and more!).

The article PACMAN danger on M1s: chip vulnerability discovered comes from TechGameWorld.com.