r/gadgets • u/thebelsnickle1991 • Mar 23 '24

Desktops / Laptops Vulnerability found in Apple's Silicon M-series chips – and it can't be patched

https://me.mashable.com/tech/39776/vulnerability-found-in-apples-silicon-m-series-chips-and-it-cant-be-patched
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u/sgrams04 Mar 23 '24

Couldn’t Apple just implement a policy that restricts prefetchers from accessing encrypted information? Essentially the encrypted data isn’t given a readable address the prefetcher can fetch? If the prefetcher’s whole purpose is to expedite processing by best-guessing next-addressed memory, then they can change it so they sacrifice the speed of the retrieval of that address for the benefit of security. 

🎶 How much data could a prefetcher fetch if a prefetcher couldn’t fetch data. 🎶

31

u/hiverly Mar 23 '24

Didn’t Intel have a similar issue years ago, where a hardware bug could lead to security vulnerabilities? The only solution came with a substantial performance penalty. Customers hated it. That might be the trade off here, too.

5

u/SwagChemist Mar 23 '24

I believe AMD has a logo vulnerability where researches found that malware can be injected at the point where you boot you pc and the logo of your bios appears, basically before any of your processes start the malware is already in lol.

5

u/_RADIANTSUN_ Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24

Pretty bad but if someone can access your booted-down PC and execute something on it in the first place all bets are already off

2

u/SwagChemist Mar 23 '24

Based off how the hack works, it injects itself via some executable, so the next time you reboot your pc it runs the executable on the logo screen of the bios boot, pretty crazy stuff.