Apple A17 Pro Chip Hardware Flaw?
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A GitHub report claims to have discovered a hardware-level flaw in Apple's A17 Pro chip that can cause iPhones to fail during boot, but the discussion is divided on whether it's a significant security issue or just an availability problem.
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The flaw is triggered by abrupt power loss (e.g. during brownouts or unstable charging), preventing the secure world and logging subsystems from initializing. Confirmed it on real A17 Pro device.
Curious if others can reproduce this, or if similar behavior exists in M-series chips.
I2C is always vulnerable to one device locking up the bus-- indeed almost all buses are. But it's intended to be a bus hooking up multiple pieces of hardware.
This is an interesting phenomenon-- source account is 100% dubious Apple "bug reports" and then we have another completely new account choosing to misinterpret the dubious report (which isn't really security related despite involving a security component) as a critical vulnerability. The cited reports all ring like they're written by a LLM.
If I want to talk to ChatGPT, I'll go to the site or use the API kthx.
Long press hard reboot should rectify that if the device isn't severely damaged in a way that causes permanent instability on I2C4. And if it is, then welcome to board level repair, here's your introductory can of pickled suffering.
Now, if you could use that to pwn SEP? Or boot into a custom ROM, checkm8 style? That would be something. But I see zero evidence of this being exploitable in any way.
These are not ephemeral or misinterpreted logs... they’re hard evidence that SecureROM and HAL subsystems are exposing debug logic in production mode. That shouldn't be possible unless the chip itself is violating its own trust enforcement model.
If this behavior is reproducible across multiple production devices, it's a class of vulnerability that Apple cannot patch in software. We're talking about a silicon-level debug bypass that persists without jailbreak, unsigned code, or tampering.
Strongly recommend pulling logs from known-good A16/A17 Pro devices and look for those same entries.
But it's AI slop so who knows if it's even real. At best its wildly overblown.
Worse, the system prunes logs aggressively, erasing the very diagnostic history that could expose this behavior. So not only is debug logic unintentionally enabled, the evidence is self-erasing.
That’s like saying that if the circuit breaker melts, it might melt one next to it too, and certain outlets wont work anymore…
Only thing that fixes it, is a hard reboot.
I wonder if that is related to this flaw.
No evidence of any security issue is presented. Though it's certainly wanted to drum it as something major 'This is a high-severity, unpatchable design flaw'.
Think: stolen phones, shady repair shops, or border checks — cases where physical access + this flaw = real risk.
That’s why a hardware recall may be necessary... fuses are meant to be irreversible. If they fail, there's no patch.
- SPU is not a processor, it's a generic term that encompasses multiple coprocessors.
- The log lines don't even mention the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP).
- Each line of log output is its own thing and there is no reason to think they have anything to do with each other.
- Those are not specifically serial logs. It is possible to get the same logs over serial, but only with a development unit, Security Research Device, or jailbreak.
It's that a production device entered a state where normally fused-off debug logic became accessible. That shouldn’t be possible, regardless of how the logs were captured or named.
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