Came across an interesting Twitter thread about how security conscious Apple’s M1 is relative to Intel.
The thread continues for awhile, has multiple sub threads, and is an interesting read overall. Simplified TLDR: basically while no system is perfect, security is much tighter in Apple’s SOC than anything from Intel with each component and coprocessor, even supposedly secure ones, being behind their own “firewalls” (of sorts actually IOMMUs which handles memory transactions and IO - literally standing for Input Output Memory Management Unit) and untrusted by every other component and coprocessor … and no obviously bad choices like the Intel Management Engine. AMD has a similar system to Intel, but I don’t *think* it’s been found to be quite as vulnerable.
The thread continues for awhile, has multiple sub threads, and is an interesting read overall. Simplified TLDR: basically while no system is perfect, security is much tighter in Apple’s SOC than anything from Intel with each component and coprocessor, even supposedly secure ones, being behind their own “firewalls” (of sorts actually IOMMUs which handles memory transactions and IO - literally standing for Input Output Memory Management Unit) and untrusted by every other component and coprocessor … and no obviously bad choices like the Intel Management Engine. AMD has a similar system to Intel, but I don’t *think* it’s been found to be quite as vulnerable.
