MEMORY INTEGRITY ENFORCEMENT: A COMPLETE VISION FOR MEMORY SAFETY IN APPLE DEVICES

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), introduced in the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air, combines secure memory allocators with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) hardware to provide continuous memory safety against advanced spyware exploiting memory corruption. It uses hardware-enforced memory tagging to prevent buffer overflows and use-after-free attacks by assigning secret tags to memory and terminating processes when tags are incorrect. Tag Confidentiality Enforcement also defends against side-channel attacks, including Spectre V1 mitigations. Apple's tests show MIE defeats all recent real-world exploits, forcing attackers to restart development with new techniques and making memory corruption exploits more difficult and costly.