Researcher Found Hardware Bug in Apple M1 chip

Joseph Ravichandran of Indian-origin and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have identified a new hardware bug in Apple's in-house silicon M1 chip, which powers the Mac. Invented by Ph.D. student Ravichandran, 'Pacman' enables it to prevent cyber attacks. 

The M1 chip uses a feature called 'pointer authentication', which acts as a last line of defense against specific software vulnerabilities. According to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researchers, 'pointer authentication' can be defeated without leaving any trace. Also, 'Pacman' uses a hardware mechanism, so no software patch can ever fix it.

The idea behind 'pointer authentication is that even if all else has failed, you can still rely on it to prevent attackers from gaining control of your system, said Ravichandran, co-lead author of the MIT paper. He further said that the team has shown that as a last line of defense, pointer authentication is not as complete as we once thought. 'Pointer authentication is primarily used to protect the most privileged part of the Core Operating System Kernel system.