When developing the M1 chip, Apple included several layers of security, each of which is designed to
protection from increasingly sophisticated attackers.The final frontier of the system is the “PAC” (Pointer Authentication Code), which turned out to be vulnerable at the hardware level. The discovery was reported by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who managed not only to bypass the protection, but also to do it remotely - without physical access to the device. The attack used for this was called “PACMAN”, and its hardware nature indicates the impossibility of a solution by updating the software.
The research team that discovered the vulnerability immediately notified Apple, to which it issued the following statement:“Based on our analysis, as well asBased on the details that the researchers shared with us, we have concluded that this issue does not pose an immediate threat to our users and is not, on its own, sufficient to bypass operating system security controls..
© Vladimir Kovalev.
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