PACMAN

What CPUs are Affected?

We’ve shown PACMAN to work on the Apple M1 CPU. Update 9/1/2022: ARM has discovered many of its cores are also vulnerable to PACMAN.

Who discovered PACMAN?

PACMAN was discovered by researchers at MIT CSAIL. Co-first authors: Joseph Ravichandran Weon Taek Na And: Jay Lang Mengjia Yan

What’s the kernel?

The kernel is the most privileged part of your computer’s operating system. Compromising the kernel means that an attacker can do anything you can do (eg. read any file, see browser data, etc.). PACMAN works across privilege levels, so it works on the kernel from user mode.

Does this attack require physical access?

Nope! We actually did all our experiments over the network on a machine in another room. PACMAN works just fine remotely if you have unprivileged code execution.

Should I be worried?

As long as you keep your software up to date, no. PACMAN is an exploitation technique- on its own it cannot compromise your system. While the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be.