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.