Technology

This is a real problem, and Apple can’t patch it out of the hardware. The only thing they can do is write software to run in advance of hardware execution to “randomize” when and where memory is written to and read from. That will slightly decrease the performance of these chips. The “older” chips from 2021 would see the worst performance reduction. M3 users probably won’t even be able to tell.

The attack vector is a web browser. Even a completely updated safari is vulnerable, but Chrome is seemingly easier to exploit (the way browsers store website data in memory is the key). An encrypted browser won’t change anything because the attack is reading the unencrypted data being displayed to the user.

It takes several minutes for a compromised website to perform the attack. So basic sense practices apply. If you think a website is unsafe, don’t open it. If you think something is happening, closing the suspicious sites immediately might stop the attack before any damage is done. I don’t know how easy it would be to compromise a trusted site, but it’s been done in the past.

Apple could potentially patch Safari to do things that make it harder for the attack to work correctly, and you can bet they’re already retooling the next generation of processors to get rid of this exploit. They did the same thing when an unpatchable exploit was found in the M1 series, M2s have a stopgap measure, and M3s were redrawn to make it an nonissue.