I think you'd also need to build hardware for that end, given e.g. Intel's Management Engine operating at Ring -3, and having a whole string of known exploits.
> During our research, we explored several components, including Broadcom’s Wi-Fi firmware, the DART IOMMU, and Apple’s Wi-Fi drivers […] We’ve also seen how the iPhone utilises hardware security mechanisms, such as DART, in order to provide isolation between the host and potentially malicious components.
Companies like NSO Group are certainly capable of developing exploits of this complexity, as Google's team has shown. Their analysis of NSO's FORCEDENTRY exploit showed NSO building a mini-VM from scratch within a little-known image codec used by the iMessage PDF engine: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
It is extremely difficult to defend against teams that have this amount of skill and dedication.
Very happy that book on NSO has made the waves it has in my political circles. Everyone needs to be aware of the security/safety climate journalists, and anyone who wants to challenge governments/capital in any meaningful way are facing.
Any more links like those? Fantastic stuff. Should I just be reading Google Project Zero's blog? I've recently found offensiveCon thanks to hackernews.
Time and money. These groups are funded 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, per person, to dig into your code and find problems to exploit. Unless your place of work has an even bigger security team, you have no chance.