Reply to post: Re: ARM or Apple?

Apple M1 chip contains hardware vulnerability that bypasses memory defense

big_D Silver badge

Re: ARM or Apple?

The other thing is, the ARMs (and other types of CPU) that don't have this protection are already vulnerable to such attacks (the point of this technology is to protect the pointers from manipulations), so this attack just brings the extra protection that ARM chips with pointer protection back to a level playing field with "normal" chips.

With a "normal" CPU chip, you can manipulate the pointers directly. With these ARM chips with pointer protection, you have to additionally crack the encryption of the pointer protection in order to manipulate it. This means it is harder to get started and it takes more time than a traditional CPU without pointer protection, but once you have spent time breaking the encryption, you can manipulate the pointers, just like any other CPU.

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