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Apple Silicon has a hardware-level exploit that could leak private data

A team of university security researchers has found a chip-level exploit in Apple Silicon Macs. The group says the flaw can bypass the computer’s encryption and access its security keys, exposing the Mac’s private data to hackers.

The silver lining is the exploit would require you to circumvent Apple’s Gatekeeper protections, install a malicious app and then let the software run for as long as 10 hours (along with a host of other complex conditions), which reduces the odds you’ll have to worry about the threat in the real world. “Through new reverse engineering, we find that the DMP activates on behalf of potentially any program, and attempts to dereference any data brought into cache that resembles a pointer,” the researchers wrote. “This paper shows that the security threat from DMPs is significantly worse than previously thought and demonstrates the first end-to-end attacks on security-critical software using the Apple m-series DMP,” the group wrote.

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