This requires local access to do and presently an hour or two of uninterrupted processing time on the same cpu as the encryption algorithm.

So if you're like me, using an M-chip based device, you don't currently have to worry about this, and may never have to.

On the other hand, the thing you have to worry about has not been patched out of nearly any algorithm:

https://xkcd.com/538/

Oops

Apple is not a secure ecosystem.

“Govt-mandated backdoor in Apple chips revealed”

There, fixed that for you.

Wow, what a dishearteningly predictable attack.

I have studied computer architecture and hardware security at the graduate level—though I am far from an expert. That said, any student in the classroom could have laid out the theoretical weaknesses in a "data memory-dependent prefetcher".

My gut says (based on my own experience having a conversation like this) the engineers knew there was a "information leak" but management did not take it seriously. It's hard to convince someone without a cryptographic background why you need to {redesign/add a workaround/use a lower performance design} because of "leaks". If you can't demonstrate an attack they will assume the issue isn't exploitable.

newly discovered side channel

NSA: "haha yeah... new..."

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself.

The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

Security experts have long known that classical prefetchers open a side channel that malicious processes can probe to obtain secret key material from cryptographic operations.

This vulnerability is the result of the prefetchers making predictions based on previous access patterns, which can create changes in state that attackers can exploit to leak information.

The breakthrough of the new research is that it exposes a previously overlooked behavior of DMPs in Apple silicon: Sometimes they confuse memory content, such as key material, with the pointer value that is used to load other data.

The original article contains 744 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I get to this part and feel like I'm being trolled.

"meaning the reading of data and leaking it through a side channel—is a flagrant violation of the constant-time paradigm."

Any chance of recall?

So does this mean it’s being actively exploited by people? How screwed is the average person over this?