From bleepingcomputer.com
A new hardware attack targeting Pointer Authentication in Apple M1 CPUs with speculative execution enables attackers to gain arbitrary code execution on Mac systems.
Pointer Authentication is a security feature that adds a cryptographic signature, known as pointer authentication code (PAC), to pointers that allow the operating system to detect and block unexpected changes that would otherwise lead to data leaks or system compromise.
Discovered by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), this new class of attack would allow threat actors with physical access to Macs with Apple M1 CPUs to access the underlying filesystem.