CySecurity News – Latest Information Security and Hacking Incidents
MIT researchers have unearthed an “unpatchable” hardware bug in Apple’s M1 processor chipsets that could allow hackers to breach its last line of security defenses.
The security loophole is rooted in a hardware-level security mechanism employed in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This mechanism restricts a hacker to inject malicious code into a device’s memory and it also shields against buffer overflow exploits, which is a form of assault that forces memory to leak into other locations of the chip and acts as the last line of defense.
Employing assault to identify vulnerability
MIT researchers demonstrated a novel hardware assault dubbed PACMAN that combines memory corruption and speculative execution to bypass the security feature. The assault depicted that pointer authentication can be breached without leaving a trace, and as it employs a hardware mechanism that cannot be patched with software features.
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