Reverse Engineering the M1

Presented at Black Hat USA 2021, Aug. 5, 2021, 10:20 a.m. (40 minutes).

<div><span>The release of M1 Macs marked a turning point for the open-source operating system community on Apple hardware. Now, the whole hardware stack would be proprietary, with little hope of reusing drivers written for standard PC hardware. At the same time, it offered an unprecedented insight into the design of the Apple SoC product line. With this motivation, we set out to reverse engineer these parts and the systems they power.</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>The talk will cover interesting quirks of Apple ARM architecture variant, such as memory access issues (and how to recognize them) and the novel AMX vector instruction set. We'll describe design patterns commonly employed by these SoCs, as well as give a short introduction to USB 4, which made its debut on them.</span></div>

Presenters:

• Stan Skowronek - Co-Founder and Chief Architect, Corellium
  Stan Skowronek is the Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Corellium. Previously, Stan was a senior secure computing architecture engineer at Bloomberg, and a GPU hardware designer at AMD. In previous reverse engineering projects, Stan added Linux kernel support for SGI Octane graphics workstations and wrote his own bare-metal boot code for Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors.

Links:

• https://www.blackhat.com/us-21/briefings/schedule/#reverse-engineering-the-m1-24042
• https://www.blackhat.com/us-21/briefings/schedule/#reverse-engineering-the-m1-240421626901442

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