Security News > 2023 > December > iPhone Triangulation attack abused undocumented hardware feature

The Operation Triangulation spyware attacks targeting iPhone devices since 2019 leveraged undocumented features in Apple chips to bypass hardware-based security protections.

The discovery and use of obscure hardware features likely reserved for debugging and factory testing to launch spyware attacks against iPhone users suggest that a sophisticated threat actor conducted the campaign.

Exploiting the flaw allows an attacker to bypass hardware protection on Apple chips that prevent attackers from obtaining complete control over the device when they gain read and write access to the kernel memory, which was achieved using the separate CVE-2023-32434 flaw.

Operation Triangulation uses these registers to manipulate hardware features and control direct memory access during the attack.

"If we try to describe this feature and how the attackers took advantage of it, it all comes down to this: they are able to write data to a certain physical address while bypassing the hardware-based memory protection by writing the data, destination address, and data hash to unknown hardware registers of the chip unused by the firmware," explains Kaspersky's report.

Kaspersky hypothesizes that including this undocumented hardware feature on the finished consumer version of the iPhone is either a mistake or was left in to assist Apple engineers in debugging and testing.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iphone-triangulation-attack-abused-undocumented-hardware-feature/