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MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

techcrunch.com

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Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#181

Post by Apocryphon »

azinman2 wrote: post #74
MertsA wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I hate this trend of naming vulnerabilities and pandering to the tech press. The CTS Labs FUD was just beyond the pale. Most tech journalism just ate up those claims that were clearly B.S. and not even self consistent. They were claiming it was impossible for AMD to patch with firmware or microcode but in the same sentence claiming an attacker could use it to create a rootkit that couldn't be removed. Nobody bot…

Actively marketing yourself and your ideas is one of the most important things you can do. Without, most people simply won’t know about it or will dismiss it. Just because you market it, doesn’t mean it’ll be successful - things still have to prove their worth regardless and will otherwise fizzle out. How many important security vulnerabilities have just had technical white papers and no marketing have gotten wider c…

Heartbleed bug was a great name for this purpose, for motivating more towards fixing it.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#182

Post by steelframe »

Fnoord wrote: post #164
azinman2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to tech journalism.

If the information was given solely to public security experts with blog presence (Matthew Green, Bruce Schneier, and a plethora of others) we could've linked to them and either ignore the 'clickbait middleman' or do most of the work for them allowing them an easier time to write up something half decent.

Matthew Green once publicly criticized something I created by simply parroting what someone else had said without bothering to do his own investigation. The original criticism turned out to be hogwash, and Matthew failed to recognize an obvious real crypto problem with the first version of my feature because he was too busy trying to just quickly stick his name into someone else's feature announcement while it was still "hot off the press."

I would take anything Matthew Green blogs about with a grain of salt. It's not clear how much of what he says is just cheap amplification of what others claim.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#183

Post by saagarjha »

dg246 wrote: post #174
jprx wrote: post #12

Hi! Joseph (one of the authors) here. You can read more about our attack here: https://pacmanattack.com

Really amazing work here! A colleague pointed out that FPAC[1] in ARMV8.6-A likely prevents this attack, is that right? I haven't fully digested the paper, but the gadgets seem to rely on AUT, and "Implementations with FPAC generate an exception on an AUT* instruction where the PAC is incorrect" [1] https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...

Same problem. Speculative failed authentication speculatively traps, speculative successful authentication accesses data.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#184

Post by KerrAvon »

reed1234 wrote: post #149
serf wrote: post #116

> https://pacmanattack.com >does PACMAN have a logo? >Yes! great, answering the hard questions. the trend of creating a marketing website for every horrible exploit is so strange. Who are these people selling to, and what? Fear to media outlets is my only guess.

Researchers write papers. They want their papers to be read by many people as they depend on them for their livelihood. Wouldn’t you market yours?

No. It’s patently unethical to equate this to something like Heartbleed. It doesn’t warrant a meme.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#185

Post by DSingularity »

steelframe wrote: post #182
Fnoord wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the information was given solely to public security experts with blog presence (Matthew Green, Bruce Schneier, and a plethora of others) we could've linked to them and either ignore the 'clickbait middleman' or do most of the work for them allowing them an easier time to write up something half decent.

Matthew Green once publicly criticized something I created by simply parroting what someone else had said without bothering to do his own investigation. The original criticism turned out to be hogwash, and Matthew failed to recognize an obvious real crypto problem with the first version of my feature because he was too busy trying to just quickly stick his name into someone else's feature announcement while it was st…

MG shows here that even a small dose of fame can ruin the biggest of nerds.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#186

Post by resters »

not2b wrote: post #179
thereddaikon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but that doesn't excuse things. There's a problem with journalism and its mostly about how they are incentivized and compensated. I don't know what the fix is but its clear that trust is so low, and rightfully so that journalism has largely failed as an industry at its job.

Journalism is paid for by ads, mostly. For online journalism, unless people click there is no money to pay the producers. Hence clickbait. This is a problem but there are worse problems.

In my opinion the requirement that HN submissions match the article's title is quite absurd because of this phenomenon.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#187

Post by smoldesu »

KerrAvon wrote: post #184
reed1234 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researchers write papers. They want their papers to be read by many people as they depend on them for their livelihood. Wouldn’t you market yours?

No. It’s patently unethical to equate this to something like Heartbleed. It doesn’t warrant a meme.

Guys, chill out. This is like halfway down their FAQ and obviously tongue-in-cheek. This is not a whitepaper, it's a press kit.

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#188

Post by aaron_m04 »

jprx wrote: post #49
ljhsiung wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Joseph! Go Illini! I didn't see you my last semester but I'm glad to see Chris's members doing well in the world. Also always love Mengjia's work. 2 questions. 1) it's relatively known that PAC is brute-forcable given its relatively small key space (16 bits, sometimes 8 if TBI is enabled). How does your attack differ from general brute forces? (My impression is just your leveraging of the BTB/iTLB is a bit more st…

ILL-INI!!! 1) Our attack does apply a brute force technique with the twist that crashes are suppressed via speculative execution. If you tried to brute force a PAC against the kernel, you'd instantly panic your device and have to reboot. 2) Given that we never sign anything (only try to verify a signed pointer), and that every authentication attempt happens under speculation, I'm not sure how you would rate limit thi…

Would it be possible instead to mitigate this by removing the side-channel: either don't leave any trace in the TLB of the speculative execution, or deny access to the TLB for user mode software?

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#189

Post by bscphil »

resters wrote: post #186
not2b wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is paid for by ads, mostly. For online journalism, unless people click there is no money to pay the producers. Hence clickbait. This is a problem but there are worse problems.

In my opinion the requirement that HN submissions match the article's title is quite absurd because of this phenomenon.

Uh, that isn't the rule, for exactly that reason.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips

#190

Post by Aeolun »

rmbyrro wrote: post #158
bee_rider wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the article, I think the journalist basically understands the situation (and if they don't, they should investigate further, that's the job). The headline is just intentionally over-dramatic to get clicks. This shouldn't be treated as a good-faith error, more guidance isn't required and wouldn't help.

It's sad that we reached a point where assuming bad faith from public informers is acceptable and, worse, reasonable.

Expected, yes. Reasonable or acceptable, no.

But what can you do about it?

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