Comment by greesil
3 years ago
ELI5 por favor, is this a class of exploits that is a function of Apple's architecture, kind of like how specter was for the whole branch prediction thing IIRC? Or is this something that can be fixed with a software update and no performance impact.
From what I understand, there was an unused hardware register not used by the OS that was the entry way for this attack. It’s been patched with no performance impact and there was an earlier HN submission with more details. It took advantage of 4 or 5 bugs that have been patched. Warning, this has been SCREAMING state actor vs state actor
No, it's at best a strange debugging feature left accessible by mistake
Fixed by blocking access to its registers, if I'm not mistaken, without performance impacts.