These are troubled times for Silicon Valley tech giant, Apple. Hard on the heels of the US Justice Department suing Apple for monopolizing the smartphone market comes news of a major security flaw in Apple M-series chips (M1, M2, and M3).
The US Justice Department appears determined to call time on Apple’s long-standing domination of the smartphone market. It holds that “Apple’s broad-based, exclusionary conduct” makes it harder for Americans to switch smartphones. Apple also stands accused of undermining innovation for apps, products, and services, and imposing extraordinary costs on developers, businesses, as well as on consumers.
The Justice Department argues that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphones markets, and it uses its control over the iPhone to engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct, maintaining Apple’s monopoly power while extracting as much revenue as possible.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said: “Apple will only continue to strengthen its smartphone monopoly. The Justice Department will vigorously enforce antitrust laws that protect consumers from higher prices and fewer choices. That is the Justice Department’s legal obligation and what the American people expect and deserve.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Apple is also facing the prospect of the European Union (EU) imposing a fine of up to 10 percent of its annual turnover. The EU is now threatening Apple, Google, and Facebook parent Meta with swingeing fines for failing to comply with a recently-introduced European ruling designed to promote competition in digital services.
Underlying security flaws in Apple chipsets
Hard on the heels of these potentially devastating regulatory body blows aimed at undermining Apple‘s dominance of the luxury smartphone market comes a report highlighting underlying security flaws in its chipsets. Academics from institutions including UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Tech carried out the academic research.
According to the researchers, Apple’s M-series chips are vulnerable to a new type of attack called “GoFetch”, which extracts secret encryption keys. The academics claim that a new understanding of how data memory-dependent prefetchers (DMPs)— behave shows that the Apple DMP will activate on behalf of any victim program and attempt to “leak” any cached data that resembles a pointer.
