‘Augury’ Security Vulnerability Found In Apple Chips

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Augury” is a new security flaw discovered in Apple’s silicon by researchers. However, for the time being, they seem to be unconcerned with the issue.

image credits: apple

University of Washington academics Michael Flanders and Jose Rodrigo Sanchez Vicarte recently collaborated on a study that was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. DMP, or Data-Memory Dependent Prefetcher, has been blamed for the security weakness, according to Digital Trends, which reported on the findings.

This problem affects Apple’s relatively new semiconductors. The M1, M1 Max, and A14 SoCs are shown here. In the worst-case situation, the DMP implementation in these chips may be leaking data, according to the study team.

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They show in their study that Apple’s implementation of the DMP differs greatly from standard DMP implementations. Prefetched data is never read by CPU cores in Cupertino’s scenario. With the Augery vulnerability in place, cybersecurity methods that attempt to trace data access are unable to identify it.

Assistant professor David Kohlbrenner at the University of Washington isn’t worried about how hackers can use this. Apple’s DMP on the impacted chips “is about the weakest DMP an attacker can obtain,” he said in a tweet.

A compromise of “data at rest,” according to a 9To5Mac report, may have occurred. Even though they’re playing it down, Apple was notified about the issue, so a remedy should be on the way shortly. M1 is already in use in a few contemporary Apple products, and this would be the first significant security flaw discovered in the M1 chip.

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For the time being, don’t worry about Augury, as long as cybersecurity experts aren’t. Not yet, at any rate. Apple is already aware of the problem and is taking efforts to fix it. In the meanwhile, please be cautious when using it.

Bugs and Chips from Apple

Not all security vulnerabilities can be blamed on the numerous generations of silicon that power your smartphone or the brand-new Mac Studio. That’s simply the way things work with this kind of technology. And Cupertino’s tech titan has proved in the past to be rather kind to people who identify serious flaws.

It was just in January that the corporation paid out $100,000 to a cybersecurity student who discovered a flaw that allowed hackers to take control of a Mac’s camera. According to WCCFTech, the student received the most sum of money that Apple has ever paid.

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The majority of Apple’s security flaws in the past depended on software. When it comes to iOS 15, the most recent major one, customers have been advised that they must upgrade their devices immediately because of an undisclosed security hole in iOS 15.3.

This article about Augury is still evolving since Apple hasn’t commented on it yet.

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