Such moments are rare - Apple generally does an excellent job preserving device and platform security. When it comes to device security, this is good advice at all times, but even Apple’s App Store has seen rare incidents in which it has been tricked into distributing malware-laden apps - Xcode Ghost is a particularly good example of this.
“Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the App Store.” All the same, those who do jailbreak their devices are potentially more vulnerable to malware, particularly when vulnerabilities exist at a processor level.
Jailbreaking is pretty much a spent force on iOS. The company will likely introduce a succession of application and system updates as it seeks to make exploitation of these vulnerabilities increasingly difficult. It’s important all users update their OS and application software as updates are introduced. If the prediction was wrong, this speculative execution is rolled back in a way that is intended to be invisible to software,” Apple explains.īoth Meltdown and Spectre take advantage of speculative execution to access privileged memory - including kernel memory - from a less-privileged user process, such as a malicious app running on a device. “To increase performance, the CPU predicts which path of a branch is most likely to be taken and will speculatively continue execution down that path even before the branch is completed. Taking advantage of a vulnerability that has been around for 20 years, Meltdown and Spectre exploit a CPU performance feature called “speculative execution.” Speculative execution exists to improve computer speed by enabling the processor to work on multiple instructions at once, sometimes in non-sequential order. Apple has confirmed that all Macs, iPhones, iPads and other devices (bar Apple Watch) are vulnerable to the newly revealed Spectre and Meltdown Intel, ARM and AMD processor vulnerabilities.
0 kommentar(er)
