New speculative attacks on Apple CPUs (predictors.fail)

Article summary

Researchers have discovered two new speculative execution attacks, SLAP and FLOP, that affect recent Apple CPUs, allowing attackers to leak sensitive data from web browsers. The attacks exploit the Load Address Predictor (LAP) and Load Value Predictor (LVP) features in Apple's M2 and M3 CPUs. These vulnerabilities can be used to recover email content, browsing behavior, location history, and credit card information. Apple has announced plans to address these issues in an upcoming security update.

Main themes

• Speculative Execution Attacks
• Apple CPU Vulnerabilities
• Browser Security
• Side-Channel Attacks
• Performance vs Security

What commenters say

• Disabling Spectre mitigations can result in significant performance improvements, but it also increases the risk of exploits.
• The threat of Spectre-like attacks is low for regular end-user desktop machines, and mitigations may not be necessary.
• Speculative execution is a necessary feature for modern CPU performance, and disabling it would result in significant slowdowns.
• The real tragedy is not the CPU vulnerabilities, but rather the complexity and insecurity of modern operating systems.
• SMT can provide performance benefits for certain workloads, but it is not a silver bullet and can also introduce contention and slow down some tasks.
• The benefits of SMT are often overstated, and it is not as effective for many types of compute-heavy processes as people think.
• Disabling JavaScript can prevent some attacks, but it is not a practical solution for most users, and browsers are already mitigating some of these vulnerabilities.
• The trade-off between performance and security is a complex issue, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.