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> how does one defend against an attacker or red-team who controls the CPU voltage rails

The xbox does have defences against this, the talk explicitly mentions rail monitoring defences intended to detect that kind of attack. It had a lot of them, and he had to build around them. The exploit succeeds because he found two glitch points that bypassed the timing randomisation and containment model.



I hope Apple is paying attention, since their first gen AirTags are vulnerable to voltage glitching to disable the speaker and the tracking warning.


I don't see much motivation for fixing that when I can purchase a nrf52xx Bluetooth Beacon on aliexpress for €4 and flash it with firmware that pretends to be 50 different airtags, rotating every 10 minutes, and therefore bypassing all tracker detections.


What's the battery life like on one of those?


Months if the firmware properly sleeps.


They're also, as it turns out, vulnerable to a drillbit


It's pretty trivial to just open it up and disconnect the speaker too. I took one apart to make a custom wallet card out of it and broke the speaker in doing so; the rest of it worked perfectly fine (though obviously the warning would still work).


Apple has a team that works on glitching protection for their phones. Disabling the speaker on AirTags is a very different threat model.


Isn't airtags completely and utterly broken, or has anything changed?




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