The second comment on the page sums up what I was going to point out:
I’d be careful making assumptions like this ; the same was true of exploits like Spectre until people managed to get it efficiently running in Javascript in a browser (which did not take very long after the spectre paper was released). Don’t assume that because the initial PoC is time consuming and requires a bunch of access that it won’t be refined into something much less demanding in short order.
Let’s not panic, but let’s not get complacent, either.
This specifically was in response to a claim about the police taking your laptop despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to enhance their ability to do anything with possession of your laptop until they are able to bypass a password.
It depends, some M-devices are iOS and iPadOS devices, which would have this hardware issue but don’t have actual background processing, so I don’t believe it’s possible to exploit it the way described.
On Mac, if they have access to your device to be able to set this up they likely have other, easier to manage, ways to get what they want than going through this exploit.
But if they had your device and uninterrupted access for two hours then yes.
Someone who understands it all more than I do could chime in, but that’s my understanding based on a couple of articles and discussions elsewhere.
What I’m worried about is Apple overreacting and bottlenecking my M3 pro because “security”. We already saw how fixes for these types of vulnerabilities on Intel and AMD silicon affected performance; no thank you.
This requires local access to do and presently an hour or two of uninterrupted processing time on the same cpu as the encryption algorithm.
So if you’re like me, using an M-chip based device, you don’t currently have to worry about this, and may never have to.
On the other hand, the thing you have to worry about has not been patched out of nearly any algorithm:
https://xkcd.com/538/
The second comment on the page sums up what I was going to point out:
Let’s not panic, but let’s not get complacent, either.
That’s the sentiment I was going for.
There’s reason to care about this but it’s not presently a big deal.
I mean, unpatchable vulnerability. Complacent, uncomplacent, I’m not real sure they look different.
Can’t fix the vulnerability, but can mitigate by preventing other code from exploiting the vulnerability in a useful way.
Sure. Unless law enforcement takes it, in which case they have all the time in the world.
Yup, but they’re probably as likely to beat you up to get your passwords.
No way! Even the evil ones will try to avoid jail.
Meanwhile they might have a friggin budget for the GrayKey, the Stingray…
Definitely believe rights are more likely to be violated when they can just plug in or power on without getting their gloves dirty.
It still requires user level access, which means they have to bypass my login password first, which would give them most of that anyways.
Am I missing something?
Shady crypto mining apps for starters
Yes, if you install malware it can be malware.
This specifically was in response to a claim about the police taking your laptop despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to enhance their ability to do anything with possession of your laptop until they are able to bypass a password.
Ah yes, good old Rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
So if someone somehow gets hold of the device then it is possible?
It depends, some M-devices are iOS and iPadOS devices, which would have this hardware issue but don’t have actual background processing, so I don’t believe it’s possible to exploit it the way described.
On Mac, if they have access to your device to be able to set this up they likely have other, easier to manage, ways to get what they want than going through this exploit.
But if they had your device and uninterrupted access for two hours then yes.
Someone who understands it all more than I do could chime in, but that’s my understanding based on a couple of articles and discussions elsewhere.
I want to say “passkeys” but if I’m honest, that too is susceptible to this attack.
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What I’m worried about is Apple overreacting and bottlenecking my M3 pro because “security”. We already saw how fixes for these types of vulnerabilities on Intel and AMD silicon affected performance; no thank you.