Apple · Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) · Privilege escalation · Apple M5 · macOS · Anthropic · Tom's Hardware
First Apple M5 memory exploit discovered tapping Anthropic AI, gives root access on MacOS
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Thanks to AI-assisted security research, hackers with hats of various colors are finding exploits everywhere.
Key facts
The researchers tested their code on an Apple M5 machine and macOS 26.4.1
The exploit chain impressively sneaks past MIE, a security feature present on M5 and A19 chips that labels each 16-byte memory slice with a 4-bit tag associated with the pointers that use it
The base feature is part of ARM MTE, and MIE is an Apple-added layer that enforces the said checks at the hardware level, with purportedly little to no performance overhead, and only 3% memory wastage
Now, it's Apple's turn with a local privilege escalation that gets past the M5 chips' much-vaunted Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE)
Summary
There aren't many technical details, but the vulnerability is simple in practice: run a command as a standard user and gain root (administrator) access to the machine. However, the exploit remains concerning, as it's relatively easy to trick a user into running it and, with full system control, also hard to find and remove. Mercifully for Captain Cook's ship, instead of being a zero-day reveal out of nowhere that left systems administrators scrambling, the exploit in question was disclosed to the company in advance (in person, no less). The researchers tested their code on an Apple M5 machine and macOS 26.4.1. As an oversimplification, MIE ensures that any memory read or write operation acts on the data that it was originally meant to, even at the kernel level.