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In addition to a new chip and upgraded cameras announced at Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event earlier this week, the iPhone 17 lineup comes with a “groundbreaking” security feature designed to protect your device against hackers.
The upgrade, which Apple is calling Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), targets spyware tools like Pegasus, a surveillance software that can extract data from compromised mobile devices running iOS or Android. By reducing an attacker’s ability to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities on Apple devices, MIE is intended to disrupt the surveillance industry and make “mercenary spyware” far more expensive to develop and maintain.
What this security update means for the iPhone
According to the announcement from Apple’s Security Research team, Memory Integrity Enforcement is “the industry’s first ever, comprehensive, always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces” with protection for the kernel and more than 70 userland processes.
The feature is built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification released in 2022, which finds and reports memory corruption bugs in real time. It also includes mitigation for Spectre V1, a speculative-execution vulnerability, with minimal impact on performance (“virtually zero CPU cost,” according to Apple).
What do you think so far?
Memory Integrity Enforcement protects users by default and is supported by the new A19 and A19 Pro chips found in the iPhone 17 lineup and the iPhone Air. Apple is also implementing memory safety upgrades for older hardware that doesn’t support memory tagging.
As The Verge notes, this update from Apple is akin to memory integrity security features for Windows 11 and MTE found on Google’s Pixel 8 series and later.