If the performance of Apple’s M1 chip has always been above average, security could be lacking today.
Released in November 2020, Apple’s M1 chip was a real revolution for the computing world. The first chip produced in-house by Apple, it ridiculed the competition with performance well beyond the expectations of even Apple engineers. But here it is, the world is not all rosy, and all the newly created computer parts have flaws.
If the engineers in charge of the design of M1 have done everything to make these flaws as inaccessible as possible, they still exist. Researchers from MIT and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AIL) have made a major discovery on this subject. Indeed, they claim to have found a structural flaw within the Apple chip. In other words, the worst nightmare of the engineers in charge of the design of M1 has just come true.
A problem that cannot be fixed
This problem, since it is structural, can never be corrected by Apple on its M1 chips. Although the MIT and AIL researchers said it was only a “theoretical” problem, there is still a slight possibility that hackers will use the so-called “PACMAN” method to steal data within a device.
In their joint report, the MIT and AIL researchers assured that it was theoretically possible to obtain full access to the kernel of the central operating system. As they explain in their report, the men (and women) behind this find succeeded in developing a system capable of discovering the correct value needed for pointer authentication.
Pointer authentication, the latest security solution
To fully understand how problematic this can be from a cybersecurity perspective, one must understand what pointer authentication is. The latter is a security solution that helps protect the central processing unit against an attacker who has gained access to the memory.
” The idea behind pointer authentication is that if all else fails, you can still rely on it to prevent attackers from taking over your system.“, explained Joseph Ravichandran, one of the co-authors of the article. If this announcement obviously raises many questions, it did not overreact Apple.
Apple is confident in its technology
The latter has indeed announced that “ Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded that this issue poses no immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass system security protections on its own. ‘exploitation’.
MIT researchers also share this opinion, they who assure that it is very difficult to reproduce this attack in “real life”.
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