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| Apple's M1 has an unrecoverable vulnerability |
A developer has discovered that Apple's new M1 processor has a flaw that creates a covert channel.
This secret channel can be used by two or more malicious apps installed to transfer information between them.
Developer Hector Martin said: Secret connections can be made without using computer memory, files, or other operating system functions.
Channels can link running processes with different user identities and different authorization levels.
These features allow apps to exchange data in undetectable ways - or at least that don't require special hardware to exchange data.
The insect is harmless, Martin said, because it cannot be used to infect Macs.
It cannot be used by exploits or malware to steal or tamper with the data stored on the device.
Only the non-Mac M1 vulnerability can be used to exploit this vulnerability by installing two or more malicious applications through the Mac.
A security vulnerability in Apple products, however:
Martin M1 Racles called this bug a technical definition of a vulnerability. Hence the name of the vulnerability: CVE-2021-30747.
This error violates the OS security model as you should never secretly send data from one process to the next.
Additionally, you should not write random processor system records from user space.
This assessment was also endorsed by other researchers with extensive security experience in processing and silicon.
The detected errors cannot be used to derive information about an application in the system and can only be used as a communication channel between two malicious applications.
Covert channels may be more important on the iPhone as they can be used to bypass the built-in sandbox in iOS apps.
Under normal circumstances, malicious keyboard apps cannot avoid keystrokes because these apps cannot access the Internet.
Secret channels can bypass this protection by passing keystrokes to another malicious application, which in turn sends them over the Internet.
Even so, both apps are unlikely to pass the Apple verification process before they are installed on the target device.
Defects in the current chipset cannot be corrected or repaired.
The vulnerability shows more clearly that chip flaws (technically called bug faults) are present in nearly all processors and even newer processors have the advantage of learning from previous bugs in other architectures.