Communications of the ACM
MIT Researchers Discover New Flaw in Apple M1 CPUs That Can't Be Patched
The researchers said the attack method makes it possible to distinguish between a correct Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) and an incorrect hash, permitting a bad actor to "brute-force the correct PAC value while suppressing crashes and construct a contr
Credit: Apple
A novel hardware attack dubbed PACMAN has been demonstrated against Apple's M1 processor chipsets, potentially arming a malicious actor with the capability to gain arbitrary code execution on macOS systems.
It leverages "speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity," MIT researchers Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan said in a new paper.
What's more concerning is that "while the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be," the researchers added.
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