Topic: Apple chip flaw allows access to private keys (Read 317 times)

I would prefer to just uninstall Trust Wallet and all other wallets from my phone. There is no reason to be having any on it in the first place.

And then there's the Android vulnerability that HeRetiK mentioned. I mean guys, nobody audits smartphones for cryptographic security. Can you really trust them for storing any amount of cryptocurrency?


I would buy a Macbook now that Microsoft Windows has somehow become even more garbage than it was 5 years ago, but when I have the choice I like to get some second-hand hardware and install some flavor of Linux on it.

Depends. In 2013 there was a flaw in Android's supposedly secure RNG [1] that caused a couple of folks to lose their coins.

Apart from that, most 0days (and presumably some of the more complex sidechannel attacks) are used in very targeted attacks by state-level actors and organizations of comparable scale. Think espionage and covert sabotage. So targets will usually include politically exposed persons, journalists, researchers, critical infrastructure, etc. Keep in mind that once a 0day has been discovered it can be considered burned, so it is in their best interest to use them as sparingly as possible and not waste them for a few Bitcoin wallets. And good 0days can fetch up to a couple millions, so it wouldn't be especially economical either.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-08-11-android

Doesn't matter which brand you choose, Huawei, Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Google, Honor, Realme, etc... They all spy, you can choose who you want to spy on you. If you live in the USA, probably you want to get spied by China instead of the USA.

I have used Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung since 2016 (with Bitcoin wallet since 2016) and I have always kept some coins in them that were always worth some thousand dollars. I have never been a victim of any attack. I want to know, how do you become a victim of an attack? I don't hold coins on them anymore but was I extremely lucky? I was using smartphones regularly.

Happy to be 100% free of all Apple products, I liked them a lot over 25 years ago, but not for a long time now. Apple was more interesting when they were a small underdog company, not a huge proprietary monster.

👀

There was a user in the forum who joked that if you buy an Apple smart phone, you'll be spied on by the CIA and if you buy a Huwawei smart phone, you'll be spied on by China. But with all those discoveries of Zero Day exploits in Apple products, there's probably some truth that these companies are infiltrated and that their products are bugged, no?

Tin-foil hats on.

Serious security vulnerability detected in iPhone iOS, allowing device infiltration through the iMessage App.

Crypto users are advise to disable iMessage for all iPhone users to protect their crypto, especially those using Trust Wallet.

https://twitter.com/TrustWallet/status/1780020931533959229

https://cointelegraph.com/news/apple-ios-imessage-zero-day-crypto-exploit-warning-trust-wallet

That makes me remember the mystery behind the hacks made against the users of Atomic Wallet. They should probably cross-check Mac/IOS vulnerability and what versions of their app was vulnerable. If it's 90% Apple products' users that had their Atomic Wallets hacked, then the claim that "there's no record of victims of this hack" might not be true.

Although, and I should mention this, you are not affected by this if you use Electrum with a hardware wallet.

If you can't move your stuff out of your Mac for whatever reason, then 1) put uBlock origin on your browsers and 2) make your entire Mac route through NextDNS and create a custom profile for it that blocks all malware sites, newly registered domains, "websites on DNS subdomains", and so on and 99.9% of the web threats will be mitigated.

I don't visit any strange or unknown websites, so I think I'll be safe but anyway, no one knows what's going to happen, so better be safe than sorry. Btw why won't it be the best decision to download Electrum wallet on a new device, create a new wallet, save credentials and then send coins from MacBook's Electrum wallet to another Electrum wallet address?

It's not an easy path because the market is too saturated for newbies and it's getting difficult for newcomers to find a job, you need good connections and you have to send CV to as many company as possible.
Check this thread, this is one of my first UI/UX design in overall: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.56084659
I was designing an app for bitcointalk but later gave up because no one was interested.

Due to the complexity of the attack, it's difficult to believe that hackers would want to massively disseminate malware exploiting this flaw, especially because it was recently disclosed, it may be more viable for them to focus their efforts on someone who is highly targeted and has a better chance of success, so it's not really a reason to panic (yet). Regardless, in digital security whenever there is a vulnerability, we assume that your computer is infected with malware capable of exploiting that vulnerability and extracting Bitcoin private keys.

Assuming that your macbook is affected by this vulnerability and that you have decided to transfer the funds to a new wallet outside the macbook with the M chip, it would not be the best decision to transfer the funds directly from the affected notebook, what you can do is, take the encrypted file (in the case of Electrum, your defaut_wallet) and open electrum by accessing the encrypted Electrum keystore and make this transaction on the device free from the vulnerability (remember, the flaw is in the M1 chips, so if you have an intel chip macbook, theoretically is fault-free).

Or you restore the Electrum wallet on another device using the Electrum seedphrase and make the transaction.

It's worth remembering that I'm not a security expert, I'm just a curious person trying to stay informed every day to increasingly improve my security and privacy habits and find the best possible balance between these two and convenience.

Overall, the decision to view this as a red alert will depend on each Mac owner.

It's cool that you work with UI/UX Design, I'm also learning and who knows how to make a profession out of it.

I bought MacBook M1 in 2020, that was the first year the M1 series was released and that was the time when I went into UI/UX design, so the MacBook is a very necessary and beneficial tool for me because of it's performance, some unique software and 100% sRGB screen. I keep my Electrum hot wallet here and on my smartphone, I have never experienced any hack and I have owned Bitcoin wallets for many years. Am I in danger because of that flaw? Should I remove Electrum from MacBook? Btw I limit myself from visiting new and unknown websites.

How dangerous are these flaws? No one panics as I see.

Is there not a way to pin macOS applications to a particular CPU cluster? Like for example the article states that M1 has two clusters. This attack does not work across clusters and can only read stuff inside one cluster. So if your wallet app is "pinned" to one cluster and your browser to another, then that will mitigate you from most of the web-based attacks.

Problem is I don't even know whether this is possible. On Windows I can set the process affinity from Task Manager and I can do something similar on Linux too.

Web-based wallets and browser extensions are out-of-luck, though. Unless those run in their own process, which I find unlikely (although Chromium does something like that).

I heard about the newly discovered issue with Apple M-series chips from this source:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

An attacker could extract encryption keys when the chip executes popular cryptographic protocols. It can't be fixed or patched easily because the attack is related to the design of the chips' silicon architecture. It can only be mitigated by reworking the software, but that could severely impact the performance of the chip as they explain in the article. The vulnerability takes advantage of a chip's DMP, whose job is to improve computing efficiency.

It works if a malicious process and the cryptographic operation run at the same time and on the same CPU cluster. They also explain that an attacker can't directly extract the targeted encryption keys. But they can manipulate data that is then processed by the DMP to leak keys.

The attack software the researchers tested doesn't require root access on the attacked machine. The same privileges that macOS gives 3rd-party apps is enough for a potential attack. Key extraction works from both traditional and quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. They even provide examples of how much time it takes to retrieve keys: Under an hour for a 2048-bit RSA key and up to 10 hours for a Dilithium-2 key. The software was also successful against Diffie-Hellman and Kyber-512 keys.

Regarding mitigations:

Apple's M3 chips have an option to disable DMP. A feature that is missing in M1 and M2 chips according to my understanding.
They also made comparisons with Intel's Raptor Lake processor and found that they don't leak secret keys using the same attack model because the DMP can be disabled.

There's a very similar flaw that was discovered in Intel, AMD, ARM-based, and IBM processors a couple years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)

It's weird that this isn't mentioned in the article because it was a rather big thing back then and apart from implementation details the exploit seems to work pretty much the same (at least at a first glance, I might be missing something).

A vulnerability has been discovered in Apple's M1, M2 and M3 chips that allows attackers to access the private keys of Mac devices through side-channel-attack.

Modern processors have a technique called "prefetching" to optimize performance and activity patterns.

The prefetcher stores data in the cache memory, this data acts as a locator to access information more quickly for the user and in this way it can leak information, allowing attackers to access it via a side channel attack.

What caught my attention the most, from what I understood, was the possibility that an attacker could inject malicious javascript code into a site, so that when Mac users access these sites, the malicious script acts to obtain the cache data and consequently, If a user has accessed private data such as private keys, seeds, etc., the information may be saved there temporarily.

Is there a similar flaw in Intel processors and others that have not yet been discovered?

Remembering that the failure affects chips from Apple's M line, that is, the same goes for iPads that also contain an M chip.

At the moment there is no record of victims of this attack, but the moment requires attention.

According to what I found in the news (I'll leave one of the links below), the fault can't be corrected, as it is at a hardware level and not a software one (read the details in the news).

The vulnerability is considered serious and it is recommended that if you have created bitcoin wallets on Mac devices, you create a new wallet on a non-Apple device and transfer the funds.

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Links: https://cointelegraph.com/news/unpatchable-flaw-apple-chip-access-encrypted-data

https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/apple-chips/

https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1770869722760061195?ref=zetter-zeroday.com