"While all of the vulnerabilities were zero-day bugs when patched, one attracted particular attention, because it turned out to be an undocumented hardware vulnerability.
Larin described the bug as “insane”, saying it’s a hardware feature in Apple’s A12 to A16 Bionic system-on-chip (SoC).
The feature, he said, allows attackers to “bypass the hardware-based kernel memory protection” in target iPhones, if they write data to “unknown memory-mapped input-output (MIMO) hardware registers” that Apple’s firmware doesn’t use.
Larin said the research team found six undocumented MIMO addresses used by the Triangulation exploit, which “basically, bypass all hardware-based kernel memory protections”.
He said they appear to be ARM/Apple CoreSight debug registers for GPUs, since they’re nearby identified MIMO registers.
In a statement, Larin said that "due to the closed nature of the iOS ecosystem, the discovery process was both challenging and time-consuming.”
"Forgotten" debugging registers enabled Triangulation exploit against iPhones: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/forgotten-debugging-registers...
"While all of the vulnerabilities were zero-day bugs when patched, one attracted particular attention, because it turned out to be an undocumented hardware vulnerability.
Larin described the bug as “insane”, saying it’s a hardware feature in Apple’s A12 to A16 Bionic system-on-chip (SoC).
The feature, he said, allows attackers to “bypass the hardware-based kernel memory protection” in target iPhones, if they write data to “unknown memory-mapped input-output (MIMO) hardware registers” that Apple’s firmware doesn’t use.
Larin said the research team found six undocumented MIMO addresses used by the Triangulation exploit, which “basically, bypass all hardware-based kernel memory protections”.
He said they appear to be ARM/Apple CoreSight debug registers for GPUs, since they’re nearby identified MIMO registers.
In a statement, Larin said that "due to the closed nature of the iOS ecosystem, the discovery process was both challenging and time-consuming.”