Psst! Hiya child! Need to reverse-engineer some iPhones? Smartly, do you know that trendy iPhones use PCIe, and in particular, NVMe for his or her garage chips? And if that is so, have you ever ever questioned about sniffing the ones communications? Surprise not more, as this analysis group displays us how they tapped them with a versatile published circuit (FPC) BGA interposer on an iPhone 6S, the primary iPhone to make use of NVMe-based garage.
The analysis was once carried out via [Mohamed Amine Khelif], [Jordane Lorandel], and [Olivier Romain], and it displays us all of the nitty-gritty of having on the NVMe chip — equipped you’re pleased with BGA soldering and possibly were given an X-ray system to hand to test for errors. As analysis stepped forward, they’ve effectively got rid of the reminiscence chip coping with underfill and BGA soldering nuances, and added an 1:1 interposer FR4 board for the primary take a look at, that proved to achieve success. Then, they made an FPC interposer that still faucets into the sign and knowledge pins, soldered the flash chip on best of it, effectively booted the iPhone 6S, and scoped the information traces for us to peer.
That is having a look just like the beginnings of a a laugh platform for iOS or iPhone {hardware} reverse-engineering, and we’re looking forward to additional effects with bated breath! This group of researchers specifically is prolific, having already been poking at such things as MITM assaults on I2C and PCIe, in addition to IoT software and smartphone safety analysis. We haven’t observed any Eagle CAD recordsdata for the interposers printed, however fortunately, many of the expertise is in regards to the soldering methodology, and the paper describes masses. Need to be told extra about those chips? We’ve lined a unique hacker taking a stab at reusing them ahead of. Or possibly, do you want to grasp NVMe in additional intensity? If this is the case, we’ve were given simply the thing for you.
We thank [FedX] for sharing this with us at the Hackaday Discord server!
