> M–chip security flaw
Encryption vulnerability in Apple and Intel chips
RESEARCHERS HAVE DISCOVERED an “unpatchable” vulnerability, dubbed GoFetch, in Apple’s M–series chips.
The researchers say the problem cannot be patched directly because it is a fundamental design flaw in the micro–architecture of modern chips — including Intel’s 13th–generation Raptor Lake CPUs as well as Apple’s M–series family of processors. Such chips use data memory–dependent prefetchers (DMPs), which speed up operations by predicting the memory addresses that running code is likely to need next and pre–loading that data into the CPU cache. It turns out that in certain very specific circumstances, this can become a “side channel” revealing encryption keys (or parts of them) when the chips are running some widely used cryptographic protocols. Four such protocols are known to be vulnerable at this time, and more may be.