An Uncorrectable Error Has Occurred In The Apple M1 Chips

introduced recently M2 processor and offers faster and stronger performance a few months ago. M1 Ultra Apple, which came to the fore with its chips, this time came to the fore with a news questioning the safety of the M1 chips, which it launched with superior security measures.

When designing the M1 chip, Apple equipped it with several layers of security designed to prevent attackers from infiltrating the next layer. However MIT security researchers created by a so-called PACMAN M1 chip attackmanaged to infiltrate what Apple describes as the last line of security.

Apple security feature busted

A major and irreversible hardware fault has been discovered in what is known as the last layer of security layers of the Apple M1 chip. Security bug, pointer authentication codes or PAC The security mechanism, called M1 chips, ensured the security. This mechanism or layer prevents an attacker from infiltrating your device’s memory, inserting malicious code.

To circumvent the security feature, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab causing memory corruption They created a new hardware attack combining speculative execution attacks. The attack is that pointer authentication can be eaten without a trace and because it uses a hardware mechanism of software update this can’t fix revealed.

The research team stated that the main idea in establishing beacon authentication is that it is the most reliable layer to prevent attackers from taking control of your system, even if all layers of security are breached. However, the beacon authentication or PAC layer, which is used as the last line of defense, turned out to be not very reliable.

Apple clarified that the problem is not so big

MIT has announced that there is no attack test for Apple’s M2 chip with PAC layer yet, but it can be done in a short time. He also explained in a research paper by MIT that if not prevented, his attacks could affect most mobile devices, and possibly even desktop computers in the next few years.

The researchers, who presented their findings to Apple, also stated that the Pacman attack was not something that could defeat all security measures in the M1 chip and could only be caused by an error in pointer authentication. After the news broke out, Apple spokesperson Scott Radcliffe in his statement, “We would like to thank the researchers for their collaboration for enabling us to develop these techniques with this proof of concept. Based on our analysis and the details shared with us by the researchers, we concluded that this issue does not pose a crisis risk to our users and is insufficient on its own to bypass operating system security protections..” said.

Even if Apple states that it is not a risky situation, we advise you to be careful when installing unfamiliar software and clicking on e-mails.