Apple M-series chips are insecure for side-channel attacks

Security researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhar University discovered two side-channel weaknesses in devices with 2021 or later apple name-brand chips, which can highlight sensitive information to the attackers. In particular, weaknesses are known as the slap and flop skim credit card information, location and other personal data. The data can be assembled from sites such as iCloud Calandar, Google Maps and Proton Mail through safari and chrome.

By 28 January, Apple is aware of the weaknesses.

“Based on our analysis, we do not believe that this problem is an immediate risk for our users,” an apple representative said ArstechnicaAccording to the researchers, Apple plans to release a patch at an unknown time.

Researchers have not found evidence of the danger actors using these weaknesses.

Which Apple devices are affected?

According to researchers, the following Apple devices include weak chips:

• All Mac laptops from 2022 to current (MacBook Air, MacBook Pro).
• All Mac Desktop from 2023 to the present (Mac Mini, IMAC, Mac Studio, Mac Pro).
• From September 2021, all iPads Pro, Air and Mini models up to the current (Prof. 6th and 7th gene., Air 6th gene, mini 6th gene).
• From September 2021 to the current (all iPhone 13, 14, 15, and 16 models, se 3rd gen.) All iPhones.

What are the slap and flop weaknesses?

Both weaknesses are based on speculative execution, a cyber attack technique that uses indirect signals such as power consumption, time, and sounds that would otherwise be secret to extract information. Contemporary apple chips inadvertently enable speculative execution attacks because they use prophecies that optimize the CPU use by “speculation”. In the case of Slap, they predict the next memory address, recovering data from CPU. In the flop, they predict the data value returned by the Memory subcistam at the next access by the CPU core.

• Slap enables an attacker to launch an end-to-end attack on the safari web browser on devices with M2/A15 chips. From safari, the attacker can use email and see what the user is browsing.
• FLOP Danger Breaks the actors in safari and chrome web browser on devices with M3/A17 chips. Once inside, they could read the location of the device, history, calendar event and collected credit card information.

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Researchers Jason Kim, Jalen Chuang, Daniel Jenkin and Yuval Jenkin wrote, “Hardware and software measures to ensure that two open webpages are different from each other, stopping one of them (from maliciousness).” His Georgia Tech Site about slaps and flops“Slaps and flops break these security, allowing the attacker page to read sensitive login-reserved data from the target webpages. In our work, we show that this data location ranges from history to credit card information. ,

Research highlights the dangerous capacity of side-channel attacks, which take advantage of both slaps and flops. It is difficult to detect or reduce side-channel attacks because they rely on assets contained for hardware.

In March 2024, Apple Silicon participated from another side-channel attack called Gofetch.

What can users do about weaknesses?

Users cannot apply mitigations to these weaknesses, as weaknesses are contained in hardware.

“Apple has communicated us that they are planning to address these issues in the upcoming security updates, so it is important to enable automatic updates and to ensure that your devices are running the latest operating systems and apps,” researchers Wrote

Techrepublic has reached Apple for more information.