Hardware Attack on Apple M1 Chip with Key Embezzlement

This white paper examines hardware-level security vulnerabilities affecting Apple’s M1 chip, with particular emphasis on microarchitectural side-channel attacks and Pointer Authentication. It provides an overview of the M1 architecture, its security mechanisms, and Apple’s efforts to mitigate threats such as Spectre and Meltdown. The paper focuses on significant attacks including PACMAN, GoFetch, Augury, and M1RACLES, explaining how processor features such as branch prediction, CPU caches, Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC), and Data Memory-Dependent Prefetchers (DMP) can be exploited to leak information or bypass security protections. It also discusses the practical impact of these vulnerabilities and their limitations, noting that most remain primarily academic or require specific conditions. The paper concludes that hardware security must be considered at the silicon and microarchitectural level, since hardware vulnerabilities can be difficult or impossible to eliminate through software updates alone.