A newly discovered vulnerability in Apple's M-series chips could lead to a leak of wallet keys

In a paper published Thursday, academic researchers revealed that a newly discovered vulnerability in Apple’s M-series chips could cause a leak of wallet keys. The vulnerability is a side channel that allows end-to-end key extraction when Apple silicon runs a crypto wallet, but this vulnerability cannot be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitecture design of the chip itself. Instead, the problem can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party encryption software that can significantly degrade the performance of the M-series when performing cryptographic operations, especially on earlier M1 and M2 generations. This vulnerability can be exploited when the target cryptographic operation and a malicious application with normal user system privileges are running on the same CPU cluster.