Side channel gives unauthenticated remote attackers access they should never have.
  • Xatolos@reddthat.comEnglish
    72·
    4 months ago

    Very. It’s unpatchable. It’s taking advantage of a speculative execution flaw, which is baked into the CPU microcode. This is the Apple M-chip version of Spectre/Meltdown that happened on x86 CPUs a few years ago.

    The best Apple can do is attempt to add some code to the OS to help prevent this issue, but if Spectre was any example, it’ll cause a hit to the CPU performance.

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.eeEnglish
      32·
      4 months ago

      The researchers published a list of mitigations they believe will address the vulnerabilities allowing both the FLOP and SLAP attacks. They said that Apple officials have indicated privately to them that they plan to release patches.

      So this’ll likely be mitigated soon, and while you’re probably right about the performance hit (which will likely be minor), I don’t think (most) Apple users need to be very worried about this.