Operation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery

Operation Triangulation is a highly sophisticated 0‑click iMessage attack chain (disclosed December 27, 2023) that combined four zero‑day vulnerabilities to achieve remote code execution, extensive JavaScriptCore-based and kernel exploitation (including full physical memory read/write), and a hardware MMIO-based Page Protection Layer bypass on A12–A16 Apple SoCs; the attackers used undocumented GPU coprocessor CoreSight/UTT registers and a custom ECC/hash mechanism to perform DMA writes that permitted patching of protected memory and eventual spyware deployment, while Apple later mitigated the issue by adding the exploited MMIO ranges to device tree pmap-io-ranges (CVE patches), though aspects of how the hardware feature was discovered remain unresolved.