Apple's in-house chips are some of the finest in terms of performance and efficiency. So much so that I have been meaning to upgrade to a Mac myself, but it appears that all M1, M2, and M3-powered Macs have a severe flaw that cannot be fixed.
The unfixable GoFetch flaw found in the Apple Silicon can completely break any encryption
Researchers have discovered a flaw they are calling GoFetch. This flaw is found in Apple's M1, M2, and M3 series of chipsets. It allows someone to extract security keys from these chips, which breaks all encryption. GoFetch is being called a “microarchitectural side-channel attack,” it affects a part of Apple's chips, known as the data memory-dependent prefature or DMP. This part is used to speed up the operations.
The thing that makes this GoFetch a serious threat is that it cannot be patched directly because it relates to the way these chips are designed. The team only explains how the DMP can only be disabled on M3 chips. This means that Apple will need to make hardware-level changes to the future M-series processor so the company can actually address this issue because, at the moment, there is no fix. Apple has been aware of this flaw since last year.
In addition to that, it is also worth noting that Apple Silicon is not the only one that is being affected here. The research team does talk about how 13th generation Intel Raptor Lake processors are also affected because they have DMP, as well. However, “its activation criteria are more restrictive, making it robust to our attacks.”'
The source has also revealed that attempts to mitigate this flaw actually come at the cost of severely debilitating performance. Running cryptographic tasks on Apple's efficiency cores can help with it since the efficiency cores don't have DMP. However, this would result in a slower performance. If it wasn't clear already, then one must be aware that there is nothing that can be done at the moment, as this is a hardware-level flaw, so if you do have a device that is powered by Apple Silicon, it is best if you are careful.
About the author: I have been tinkering with Android devices ever since the early days of the HTC Desire. Over time, I have grown a fondness for the ecosystem and now I cannot live without it. Although some might believe that I have sold my soul to Android, but I believe it is not the case. You can find me writing tutorials and posting guides on a number of different smartphones. When I am not writing here, I am wasting myself away in books, journals, or on Steam.
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