Protect Your Mac: Understanding the M-Series Processor Security Flaw

Although, I have no idea where we are

Oh, we're gonna talk about hacking the M chip. Griffin, you better do it quick

because we got one, two, I guess like two and a half stories left

But not much time to do it. We got 10 minutes. You gotta motor mouth your way through this

Hackers can exploit flaw in Apple M-series processors. This is the biggest story of the week on Kultimac.com

Security researchers have found a serious exploit in all Apple M-series processors

The flaw exposes precious encryption keys and it's baked into the hardware

So it can't easily be patched without a performance penalty. Bad news

Encryption is used to keep information that travels over the internet private. It's what makes online shopping possible

It ensures that nobody can read our texts, which is why it's troubling to say the least

The security researchers at some of America's top universities found a way to make M-series processors

leak the encryption keys that could unlock all of that security. The proof of concept tool is called GoFetch

So one of the ways M-series processors offer such great performance is with what's called

the Data Memory Dependent Prefetcher or DMP. This is what fetches data into the CPU cache

which is basically like a faster form of memory available to the processor

The DMP will read through the contents of program memory, look for pointers to any other locations in memory

and copy the reference data in advance. And this is where the researchers found the leak

They feed the DMP a bunch of cryptographic related like instructions in their program

Then they look at all of the pointer values that the DMP spits out

And over the course of a couple hours, they can piece together an entire cryptographic key

out of your Mac. Now, the good news is there are no examples

of the DMP flaw discovered by researchers and actual use by hackers

And the other good news is that on M3 chips, there's a built-in toggle switch that can disable the DMP

And that fixes the leak. But it does mean that running all these

you know, cryptography software instructions without using the DMP, like entirely in software without using the hardware

will slow down the Mac. And the bad news is that there's no toggle switch

like that on the M1 and M2 chips. So just be careful

Oh, great. Guess you got to upgrade to M3. No problem. Only the M3

I love it's a feature. Only the M3 Max chip is safe. Everyone better go upgrade

And only the 40 GPU core model, of course. That's actually probably not true

Don't sue me. But now I can't use my favorite cryptography apps

Yeah. So if and when it goes beyond the proof of concept stage, the exploit will need to be delivered in the usual ways

a virus or a Trojan horse. And software that protects against these

should block attempts to install the malware. So, you know, basically just install your software security updates on your Mac