First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5(blog.calif.io)
251 pointsby quadrige7 hours ago7 comments
  • dgellow4 hours ago
    The world is so not ready for the impact of LLMs on security issues. If true, congrats to the Calif team. It’s likely too technical for me to understand in details but looking forward to reading the 55 pages report
    • iqihs4 hours ago
      you're assuming that blue teams and engineers are sitting around twiddling their thumbs
      • nvr2193 hours ago
        Most companies in the world do not have “blue teams”. They barely have any kind of security employee.
        • steve_adams_862 hours ago
          They've got a guy (who they're considering laying off)
          • jermaustin12 hours ago
            Don't worry the LLMs that are replacing him, are also replacing the hackers too. Pretty soon (if not already), it will just be LLMs fighting LLMs.
          • micromacrofoot2 hours ago
            in my experience they have a person who does it sometimes when they have time, at best
          • UqWBcuFx6NV4r2 hours ago
            no they don’t.
            • afdbcreidan hour ago
              They don't consider laying him off?
      • dgellow4 hours ago
        Not at all. I’m considering that the amount of vulnerable software in the wild is very, very large, with most organizations not managing their systems properly. Imagine all the small to medium size companies that do not have budgets for a dedicated, talented security team. And all the software that will never be patched. We are at the beginning of the exponential
        • bottlepalman hour ago
          It makes you think will everything need to be rewritten from the ground up - potentially by AI itself, or AI having a very heavy hand in validating all of it.
          • Gigachad44 minutes ago
            There's so much much lower hanging fruit. Every job I've had has had basically everything massively out of date. Just keeping packages and framework versions up to date is a full time job and none of these companies have someone assigned to doing it.

            So much out of date software with known exploits left running for years. The only reason there hasn't been total disaster is no one has tried to hack it yet.

  • vsgherzi7 hours ago
    unfortunately a little light on the details. I'm very curious how the bug survived through MTE
    • dorianmariecom6 hours ago
      Memory Tagging Extension

      Arm published the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) specification in 2019 as a tool for hardware to help find memory corruption bugs. MTE is a memory tagging and tag-checking system, where every memory allocation is tagged with a secret. The hardware guarantees that later requests to access memory are granted only if the request contains the correct secret. If the secrets don’t match, the app crashes, and the event is logged. This allows developers to identify memory corruption bugs immediately as they occur.

      https://support.apple.com/guide/security/operating-system-in...

    • vsgherzi6 hours ago
      Upon further reading on data only attacks

      (https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/data-only-at...)

      This makes more sense. You don't trigger MTE since you're not doing anything for force MTE to take action the program isn't actually changing.

      My other question would be, why didn't apple use fbounds checking here? They've been doing it aggressively everywhere else.

      MTE plus fbounds checking everywhere should lead to an extremly hardened OS

      • pjmlp6 hours ago
        Quite strange indeed, given that was one of the main points on their security conference a few months ago.
        • vsgherzi5 hours ago
          I can only imagine that

          1. it’s to performance sensitive

          Or

          2. The os is so darn large it’s hard to recompile everything

      • aiscoming2 hours ago
        could be a different type of data only attack, which doesnt override the boundaries
        • vsgherzi2 hours ago
          Well it’s memory corruption so I think it’s pretty safe to assume it’s a bounds issue. I’m not sure if it’s possible to get this with something like type confusion tho I could be wrong here.
    • landr0id6 hours ago
      GPU memory/shaders/etc. isn't protected by MTE or PAC. They said "data-only", so I guess GPU commands could fit into this description.
      • LoganDark4 hours ago
        IIRC, the GPU is behind a memory controller, so I doubt corrupting GPU memory alone could lead to an LPE. But I suppose it would give you someplace to store stuff if you can make something else read from it.
    • traceroute663 hours ago
      > I'm very curious how the bug survived through MTE

      Its not the first time bugs get past MTE, happened with Google Pixel last year ... https://github.blog/security/vulnerability-research/bypassin...

  • yieldcrv5 hours ago
    from what they demonstrated, this seems to only be a $100,000 exploit in Apple's bug bounty platform, but if they package it right, it could be a $1.5 million exploit

    They simply have to show it against a beta version of MacOS, and frame it as unauthorized access, and maybe from locked mode if possible

    • vsgherzi4 hours ago
      This is an lpe I believe what you’re describing is a zero click rce.
      • yieldcrv4 hours ago
        how much do you think it is worth in the bug bounty program
        • vsgherzi4 hours ago
          They don’t seem to state lpe as one of the bugs. Maybe 100k? There’s alot of factors that go into it so I’m really not able to say. I could see it going for lots more or lots less
  • AgentME6 hours ago
    First Mozilla, now even Apple is making up fake vulnerabilities to hype up Mythos. /sarcasm
    • baq5 hours ago
      Cisco put up a totally bogus 10.0 CVE just for this reason, too
    • bstsb4 hours ago
      apple didn't "make up" this vulnerability, it was an external team reporting an issue
      • oompydoompy743 hours ago
        The commenter was being sarcastic to highlight the current trend of dismissing Mythos, and LLM’s finding security vulnerabilities in general, as a non issue.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r2 hours ago
      screech nothing but stochastic parrots! glorified autocomplete!
      • genxy2 hours ago
        just predicts the next word!
  • commandersaki5 hours ago
    I bought the M5 specifically cause of MIE. Now I feel dumb.
    • vsgherzi4 hours ago
      You shouldn’t, MTE blocks a large chunk of vulnerabilities and makes things like rop and jop very difficult if not impossible now.
    • aiscoming2 hours ago
      you should worry about npm/pypi malware, not memory corruption bugs
  • bredren6 hours ago
    Did the article get edited? There is not much description of the field trip.
  • tkelan hour ago
    Another breathless marketing hype for Mythos. The curl report was much more sober.

    https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...