News Summary

• The vulnerability is simple in practice: run a command as a standard user and gain root (administrator) access to the machine.
• 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.
• MIE is enforced at the hardware level in a hypervisor-like configuration and effectively protects against most common classes of security exploits, namely buffer overflows and use-after-free vulnerabilities.