Even though researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhe University Bochum identified the ‘iLeakage’ side-channel vulnerabilities present in Apple's processors back in October 2023, and the company quickly found a way to mitigate those issues, these same researchers have now found two new vulnerabilities that act very similarly.
These new flaws, dubbed FLOP (False Load Output Prediction) and SLAP (Speculative Load Address Prediction), are CPU side-channel attacks that use speculative execution implementation to steal sensitive information from web browsers. Similar attacks were the underlying cause of Spectre and Meltdown in Intel's chips years ago. These new vulnerabilities are of particular concern both because they can be executed remotely without requiring any physical access to an Apple device and also because a potential victim would only need to visit a malicious website in order for their information to be leaked.
