"It's less noticeable than a thinner profile or trick camera lenses, but Apple is pointing out another upgrade in the iPhone 17 family of phones that it says is part of "the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems." Explicitly targeting the spyware industry that produces exploits for tools like Pegasus to hack on targeted devices, a series of changes in Apple's chips, OS, and development tools are part of what it calls Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE)."
"With the introduction of the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air, we're excited to deliver Memory Integrity Enforcement: the industry's first ever, comprehensive, always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces - including the kernel and over 70 userland processes - built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) and supported by secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections."
"Apple says its implementation goes a step further, with the ability to protect all users by default and by designing its A19 and A19 Pro chips for enhanced security, while still adding memory safety changes for older hardware that doesn't support the new memory tagging features. The company also says its new mitigation for Spectre V1 leaks works with "virtually zero CPU cost" - as performance hits have been an issue for memory integrity and other security features - with all of the changes making "mercenary spyware" even more expensive to develop."
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) provides always-on memory-safety protection that covers key attack surfaces, including the kernel and over 70 userland processes, built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE). The implementation combines EMTE with secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections and is enabled by security-focused A19 and A19 Pro chip designs. Apple is also shipping mitigations for older hardware lacking native tagging. The approach aligns with prior work from Microsoft and ARM on memory tagging and pairs with Spectre V1 mitigations claimed to have virtually zero CPU cost, increasing the development cost of mercenary spyware.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]