Apple Silicon vulnerability leaks encryption keys, and can't be patched easily

A new vulnerability in Apple Silicon chips can allow a determined attacker to access a user's data by stealing the cryptographic keys — and a fix could considerably impact encryption performance.Apple Silicon M2 in front of a MacBookResearchers have discovered an issue with Apple's M-series chips, in how it deals with cryptographic operations, such as the encryption of files. However, since it is an issue with the chip's architectural design, it's something that's very difficult to mitigate.Detailed on Thursday by a group of researchers and reported by ArsTechnica, the problem lies in the data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP), which predicts memory addresses of data that will most likely be accessed by currently-running code. By prefetching data, it becomes a target for probing from malicious code. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums