Operation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery

Operation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery

Today, on December 27, 2023, we (Boris Larin, Leonid Bezvershenko, and Georgy Kucherin) delivered a presentation, titled, “Operation Triangulation: What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers”, at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3), held at Congress Center Hamburg. The presentation summarized the results of our long-term research into Operation Triangulation, conducted with our colleagues, Igor Kuznetsov, Valentin Pashkov, and Mikhail Vinogradov.


This presentation was also the first time we had publicly disclosed the details of all exploits and vulnerabilities that were used in the attack. We discover and analyze new exploits and attacks using these on a daily basis, and we have discovered and reported more than thirty in-the-wild zero-days in Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft products, but this is definitely the most sophisticated attack chain we have ever seen.


Operation Triangulation’ attack chain


Here is a quick rundown of this 0-click iMessage attack, which used four zero-days and was designed to work on iOS versions up to iOS 16.2.


Attackers send a malicious iMessage attachment, which the application processes without showing any signs to the user.
This attachment exploits the remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2023-41990 in the undocumented, Apple-only ADJUST TrueType font instruction. This instruction had existed since the early nineties before a patch removed it.
It uses r ..

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