Apple’s M1 series of silicon processors not only exists in its Mac Minis and Macbooks but also resides on the company’s iPads as well. Thus, a cybersecurity vulnerability in the SoC could lead to many modern Apple products being affected if they were to be targeted by a malicious attack.

And after announcing the company’s new M2 silicon processors at Apple WWDC 2022, news broke out that the Apple M1 silicon has been compromised in the cybersecurity department. And as both MacWorld and 9to5Mac quoted MIT researchers, the newly discovered security flaw defeats the last line of security of the M1 SoC and cannot be patched via software updates.

The highly concerning security vulnerability in M1 is named “PACMAN” because it defeats the M1’s Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) system. 

MacWorld explains that pointer authentication is a security feature that helps protect the CPU against an attacker that has gained memory access. Pointers store memory addresses, and pointer authentication code checks for unexpected pointer changes caused by an attack. In its research, MIT CSAIL created “PACMAN,” an attack that can find the correct value to successfully pass pointer authentication, so a hacker can continue with access to the computer.

Macworld quotes an MIT article with MIT CSAIL’s Joseph Ravichandran, who is the co-lead author of a paper explaining PACMAN, “When pointer authentication was introduced, a whole category of bugs suddenly became a lot harder to use for attacks. With PACMAN making these bugs more serious, the overall attack surface could be a lot larger.”

According to MIT CSAIL, since its PACMAN attack involves a hardware device, a software patch won’t fix the problem. The issue is a wider problem with ARM processors that use Pointer Authentication, not just Apple’s M1. “Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow,” Ravichandran wrote. “Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software.”

MIT was able to perform the PACMAN attack remotely. The team mentions that they actually did all their experiments over the network on a machine in another room, as they described “PACMAN works just fine remotely if you have unprivileged code execution.”

Macworld reports that Apple is aware of MIT CSAIL’s findings and issued the following statement: “We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these techniques. Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own.”

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(Via 1, Via 2)

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