I never understood the sentiment of many Apple fans around me who bark "Apple products can't be hacked or infected with viruses!"
Nonetheless, I hope that a security patch will soon be available for those affected.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple’s Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices.
The researchers have successfully leveraged iLeakage to recover YouTube viewing history, the content of a Gmail inbox—when a target is logged in—and a password as it’s being autofilled by a credential manager.
Once visited, the iLeakage site requires about five minutes to profile the target machine and, on average, roughly another 30 seconds to extract a 512-bit secret, such as a 64-character string.
“In particular, we demonstrate how Safari allows a malicious webpage to recover secrets from popular high-value targets, such as Gmail inbox content.
Finally, we demonstrate the recovery of passwords, in case these are autofilled by credential managers.”
The design of A-series and M-series silicon—the first generation of Apple-designed CPUs for iOS and macOS devices respectively—is the other.
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Don't worry, you just need to buy the next iPhone and Mac ;) – Tim Cook, maybe
/s
A patch isn't (yet) available.
But a workaround is. Configure your password manager (or switch to another password manager) so it doesn't automatically fill usernames and passwords as soon as you open a webpage. Set it to fill the credentials when you click a button or hit a hotkey.
And after this security flaw is fixed? Leave the settings like that. Because this isn't the first time autofil has resulted in a major compromise and it won't be the last time either.
PS: this speculative execution bug was reported to Apple a very long time ago and there are experimental settings you can change to test the fix... but they might be buggy. Modifying your password manager's behaviour will not be buggy. The setting is:
defaults write com.apple.safari InternalDebugProcessSwapOnCrossSiteWindowOpenEnabled 1