Though not mentioned during Apple’s keynote this week, one of the important features being added to the new iPhone 17 lineup and the iPhone Air is a security feature that will make it easier to fight spyware.
As reported by BGR, the new Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) feature was detailed in a research report published by Apple. The report covers how the feature both strengthens security and makes iOS devices less vulnerable to spyware by ensuring that only trusted code can run in protected memory; this stymies efforts to inject malicious code on the handsets. Apple has been working on the enhancement for roughly five years, and says in the report that it “represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.”
The idea behind MIE is that it will make spyware attempts even more challenging to pull off so that attacks on new iPhone will become essentially not worth the effort. While largely secure overall, more zero-day flaws have been discovered in iOS in recent years and many recent malware attempts take advantage of memory safety vulnerabilities. The MIE feature is intended to circumvent these particular loopholes by making both the hardware and the software even more impenetrable from attacks.
MIE will be included in every iPhone 17 and in iPhone Air. Apple says in the report that “MIE is built right into Apple hardware and software in all models of iPhone 17 and iPhone Air and offers unparalleled, always-on memory safety protection for our key attack surfaces including the kernel, while maintaining the power and performance that users expect.”
Apple designed the MIE system on both conceptual attacks and then challenged the system it built with vectors the iPhone would likely encounter in the wild. The company says that while it doesn’t make the iPhone 100% secure, this will make it extremely expensive and will “disrupt many of the most effective exploitation techniques from the last 25 years and completely redefine the landscape of memory safety for Apple products.”
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