Researchers have discovered a new vulnerability in Apple’s latest processors. As they comment the M1 models are affected as well as the A14 Bionic. which carries the iPhone 12. This is a failure at the microarchitecture level, which they called “omen‘. Fortunately, at the moment it seems that this is not as dangerous as it seems.

This was commented by José Rodrigo Sanchez Vicarte of the University of Illinois; and Michael Flanders of the University of Washington. Both led a team of researchers who were responsible for message discovery of the Auguria Fault. Moreover, they confirm that all these discoveries were sent to the apple before official publication.

Apple’s M1 and A14 chips use what has been called “data memory dependent prefetching”, or WMD for its abbreviation in English. this entity responsible for browsing the content stored in memory to decide which elements to preselect.

How the Augury vulnerability works in the Apple M1

Apple M1 processors

The research team specifically tested the M1, M1 Max, and A14 and found that these chips are preloaded with the pointer array dereference pattern. It turned out that in the process data that is “never read by any instruction” can be detected.not even supposed to.” This behavior is different from traditional processors.

Of course, this can lead to undesirable scenarios if cybercriminals take advantage of the vulnerability. The study explains that in much of hardware and software security, focused on defense and attack prevention, “it is assumed that there is some type of instruction that gives access to a secret.” However, these defenses could not come into play against Augurius.

“Any protection based on snooping on data accessed by the kernel (either speculative or non-speculative) cannot protect against Augury, as the leaked data is never read by the kernel.”

Fortunately, it’s not that serious.

David Kolbrenner, assistant professor at the University of Washington, seems to be pointing this out. On his Twitter account, he states that attack of this style is one of the weakest which can be done on DMP.

In fact, the researchers themselves report this in their study. Here they comment that Auguria not such a terrible weakness, at least not yet. In addition, they have not demonstrated any methods that use this model to take advantage of the system.

It is unknown if Apple has already started working on a patch for Augury., and researchers don’t know about it either. However, the company takes the security of its devices seriously enough that we will likely see a solution soon. For now, at least we know that this is not as big a problem as previously thought.


Source: Hiper Textual

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I am Bret Jackson, a professional journalist and author for Gadget Onus, where I specialize in writing about the gaming industry. With over 6 years of experience in my field, I have built up an extensive portfolio that ranges from reviews to interviews with top figures within the industry. My work has been featured on various news sites, providing readers with insightful analysis regarding the current state of gaming culture.

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