Developing the M1 chip, Apple has provided several levels of security, each of which is designed to protect against increasingly sophisticated intruders. The last frontier of the system is the “PAC” (Pointer Authentication Code) layer, which was vulnerable at the hardware level. The find was reported by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who managed not only to bypass the protection but also to do it remotely – without physical access to the device. The attack used for this purpose was called “PACMAN”, and its hardware nature indicates the impossibility of solving the software update.
The team of researchers who discovered the vulnerability immediately notified Apple, to which it issued the following statement: “Based on our analysis, as well as the details that the researchers shared with us, we concluded that this problem does not pose an immediate danger to our users and in itself is not enough to circumvent the means of protecting the operating system.”
Based on 9to5mac.com
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