Saint dmaFail, Who Wrote Where He Shouldn't

Patron of forgotten MMIO registers, Apple chips, and researchers who study one attack and find another inside it.

Life

On 28 December 2023, within the same work on Operation Triangulation, dmaFail emerged, that is CVE-2023-38606: certain undocumented hardware registers of Apple chips let an app write into kernel memory regions that should have been protected. It was the piece holding up the whole iPhone chain, a mishandled state flaw in a bit of silicon no one should have been able to touch.

Prayer

O Saint dmaFail, who writes in the corners of memory no one was watching, let every hardware register have a guardian. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating Apple devices to the fixed versions and respecting the silicon you can't see.

A forgotten register, a wide-open kernel.