Experimental interfacing with the IPhone 6s through its PCIe communication bus

One of the issues to perform hardware attacks on wired communication protocol is the physical access to the bus. Considering the iPhones, PCIe is used as a communication bus between the SoC and its non-volatile memory. This communication can be targeted by a MitM attack in order to access personal information. In this paper, we propose a physical way of interfacing between the motherboard and the non-volatile memory of an iPhone 6s. This was achieved by reverse-engineering the memory in order to retrieve the footprint and the pinout, defining a protocol to safely extract and re-solder the memory, without altering its content, and multiple tests to validate the approach. The results obtained allow us to consider the fabrication of an interposer in order to realize a real hardware MitM and to exploit a large possibility of attacks such as real-time data analysis, data-replay, shadow-copy, and so on.