The Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, and Cortex-A15 chips - which are found in iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, and iPhone 5 and 5c, respectively - are affected by the flaw, according to ARM itself. iPhone and iPad aren’t immuneĮven though Apple designs its own mobile chips, they are based on ARM architecture.
Our software shouldn’t be able to freely access things like passwords and encryption keys, but thanks to this vulnerability, that’s now possible. It means that apps could obtain unauthorized access to sensitive information that was designed to be inaccessible. The vulnerability in desktop processor has been dubbed “Meltdown.” In mobile processors designed by ARM, it is dubbed “Spectre.” What does this mean? It turns out that the implementations of speculative execution used by many CPU makers contains a serious vulnerability that leaves parts of a system’s memory exposed. This memory may contain our most sensitive data, including passwords, encryption keys, and more. This technique predicts what you might do before you actually do it in an effort to speed up common processes. I’ll try to explain this briefly and in simple terms.įor many years, chip manufacturers have been using a technique called “speculative execution” to optimize system performance.
We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. In the coming days we plan to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre. Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the App Store. All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time.
These issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all computing devices and operating systems. Google’s Project Zero team has discovered that processors designed by AMD and ARM are also susceptible to a bug that leaves parts of a system’s kernel memory exposed.Īpple confirmed the problem in a support document published Thursday that addresses the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown security flaws: It turns out that Intel isn’t the only chip manufacturer guilty of leaving its users open to attack.
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