Apple M1 Affected By "PACMAN" Hardware Vulnerability In Arm Pointer Authentication

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple M1 Affected By "PACMAN" Hardware Vulnerability In Arm Pointer Authentication

MIT CSAIL today is lifting the embargo on a new hardware vulnerability affecting the Apple M1 SoCs (no word yet on exposure with the recently announced Apple M2) and dubbed the "PACMAN" attack...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-M1-PACMAN

[reba]

You need a different existing vulnerability to even try to use this vulnerability. OK.

I understood the article differently - one can use PACMAN to circumvent protections (mitigations), thus re-enabling the possibility to trigger the underlying, normally mitigated, bug.

Also, it's in hardware so no software can ever fix PACMAN (read: no mitigation for PACMAN possible, thus no mitigation for other bug will ever work as it's always possible to apply PACMAN and disable the other mitigations)

[ayumu]

You need a different existing vulnerability to even try to use this vulnerability. OK.

Pointer authentication is a vulnerability mitigation. Thanks to PACMAN, it is practically useless. So you lose this mitigation. A waste of transistors.

[piotrj3]

This photo from article has clear rendering errors.

[skeevy420]

This photo from article has clear rendering errors.

When I saw the awning of the building I thought to myself, "Those are some hellacious drain spouts!" and wondered how much strength the water has by the time it flows from the top to the bottom during a rain storm and if it is enough to knock person off their feet when they're trying to leave the building during the rain.

My 2nd thought was, "You'd think code enforcement would notice a location where an assload of water would be dumping on people in a possibly dangerous manner."

Followed by, "Smart people tend to have dumbass designs. Did the MIT Scientists never consider the effects of gravity and water with their double downspout design?" Then I thought, "Perhaps the double downspout was their idea of a joke." since it rains so much in the northeast.

So yesterday I was watching The Price Is Right and one of the prizes was a gaming computer. The gaming computer was an iMac with an M1 processor. "Gaming computer" made me ROFL. My family asked what was so funny so I explained that the iMac was a great computer for everything but games.

[skeevy420]

Pointer authentication is a vulnerability mitigation. Thanks to PACMAN, it is practically useless. So you lose this mitigation. A waste of transistors.

Yo dawg, we heard you had a vulnerability mitigator so we designed a vulnerability to mitigate your vulnerability mitigator.

[pereiraalex]

So yesterday I was watching The Price Is Right and one of the prizes was a gaming computer. The gaming computer was an iMac with an M1 processor. "Gaming computer" made me ROFL. My family asked what was so funny so I explained that the iMac was a great computer for everything but games.

I guess the best thing for it now is for offline gaming :P :P :P

[timofonic]

M1 is now not a miracle, but a design fail. What an irony!

[kpedersen]

M1 is now not a miracle, but a design fail. What an irony!

It is the first time Apple has actually designed chips since leaving Steve's garage. I thought they did pretty well

[paulpach]

It is the first time Apple has actually designed chips since leaving Steve's garage. I thought they did pretty well

HUH?!? Apple has been designing its own chips since the A4, 12 years ago. After 10 iterations, their design got so good they put it in laptops.