iLeakage: New Safari Exploit Impacts Apple iPhones and Macs with A- and M-Series CPUs
Oct 26, 2023
Data Security / Vulnerability
A group of academics has devised a novel side-channel attack dubbed iLeakage that exploits a weakness in the A- and M-series CPUs running on Apple iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices, enabling the extraction of sensitive information from the Safari web browser. "An attacker can induce Safari to render an arbitrary webpage, subsequently recovering sensitive information present within it using speculative execution," researchers Jason Kim, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, and Yuval Yarom said in a new study. In a practical attack scenario, the weakness could be exploited using a malicious web page to recover Gmail inbox content and even recover passwords that are autofilled by credential managers. iLeakage, besides being the first case of a Spectre-style speculative execution attack against Apple Silicon CPUs, also works against all third-party web browsers available for iOS and iPadOS owing to Apple's App Store policy that mandates all b...
