Indian-origin researcher discovers new hardware bug in Apple M1 chip

San Francisco: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including Indian-origin Joseph Ravichandran, have identified a new hardware vulnerability in Apple’s in-house silicon M1 chip that powers Macs.
The threat, dubbed ‘PACMAN’ by PhD student Ravichandran, enables attackers to stop the M1 chip from detecting software bug attacks.
The M1 chip uses a feature called ‘Pointer Authentication’, which acts as a last line of defence against typical software vulnerabilities.
With ‘Pointer Authentication’ enabled, bugs that normally could compromise a system or leak private information are stopped dead in their tracks.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory found a crack as their novel hardware attack, called ‘PACMAN’ showed that ‘Pointer Authentication’ can be defeated without even leaving a trace.
Also Read iOS 16 to allow transfer of eSIM between iPhones via Bluetooth Moreover, ‘PACMAN’ utilises a hardware mechanism, so no software patch can ever fix it.