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Apple's Safari browser is still vulnerable to Spectre attacks (rub.de)
77 points by sizzle on Oct 30, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



Hmmm, the article points to the iLeakage page:

On this page, under the 'mitigations;' sections it says:

> At the time of public release, Apple has implemented a mitigation for iLeakage in Safari. However, this mitigation is not enabled by default, and enabling it is possible only on macOS. Furthermore, it is marked as unstable.

This is the 'Swap Processes on Cross-Site Window'.

I've just checked and on Sonoma, this flag is marked as Stable - and is activated by default.

It is also turned on by default on iOS 17.1.

Obviously, I don't know when this arrived, but it seems to me that the mitigation has already been rolled out.

Disclaimer: It is possible that I previously enabled this feature flag on my Mac and Phone and I forgot, but I don't think so. It also activated in the Guest User Safari settings and that is recreated as a clean account each time.


Cross origin navigation will do a process swap, but cross origin window.open()s will not, they are different flags, the former is on by default, the latter is not: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/74f89d607e2abbf27a8cd1...


My mistake. Thanks for the correction


"Swap Processes on Cross-Site Navigation" is enabled by default in Safari 17.1 on macOS Ventura 13.6.1. Is that the same feature flag?




Trying the mitigations, it fails:

  % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1
  2023-10-30 16:25:46.182 defaults[71906:4790936] Could not write domain /Users/poppopret/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari; exiting
Does this require disabling SIP?




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