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ACE up the sleeve: Hacking into Apple's new USB-C Controller

With the iPhone 15 & iPhone 15 Pro, Apple switched their iPhone to USB-C and introduced a new USB-C controller: The ACE3, a powerful, very custom, TI manufactured chip. But the ACE3 does more than just handle USB power delivery: It's a full microcontroller running a full USB stack connected to some of the internal busses of the device, and is responsible for providing access to JTAG of the application processor, the internal SPMI bus, etc. We start by investigating the previous variant of the ACE3: The ACE2. It's based on a known chip, and using a combination of a hardware vulnerability in MacBooks and a custom macOS kernel module we managed to persistently backdoor it - even surviving full-system restores. On the ACE3 however, Apple upped their game: Firmware updates are personalized to the device, debug interfaces seem to be disabled, and the external flash is validated and does not contain all the firmware. However using a combination of reverse-engineering, RF side-channel analysis

English
  • Originally Aired December 27, 2024
  • Runtime 40 minutes
  • Production Code 543
  • Created January 1, 2025 by
    r4m3u5
  • Modified January 1, 2025 by
    r4m3u5