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Speed or security? Speculative execution in Apple Silicon
How Apple’s new CPU cores can guess which code to run, and which data to load from memory. How those speculative techniques can be exploited, and should we be worried?
This article explains some techniques that are used in the CPU cores of Apple silicon chips, to improve processing speed by making execution more efficient and less likely to be delayed. Mechanisms for exploiting speculative designs are complex, and rely on a combination of training and misprediction to give an attacker access to the memory of other processes. The impact of disabling speculative execution, LAP or LVP greatly impairs performance in many situations, and isn’t generally considered commercially feasible.
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