Fortunately, Apple has recently introduced a high-impact new security feature, Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE). This ground-breaking measure dramatically improves memory safety across its devices and provides proactive protection against emerging cyber threats. MIE has been created to help address the increasing menace of mercenary spyware. This spyware exploits new memory safety vulnerabilities first disclosed to exploit an increasingly viciously targeted regime against users.
MIE aims to prevent buffer overflows and use-after-free accesses by enforcing Memory safety policy. This new feature works by retagging memory as it is reused for different purposes, effectively preventing unauthorized access to adjacent memory spaces. Apple emphasizes that MIE leverages secure memory allocators and collaborates with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) to enhance device security while minimizing performance impacts.
Memory Integrity Enforcement in Action
To accompany today’s announcement, Apple released new information about how MIE works in its devices. The technology enforces memory safety at the hardware level by preventing out-of-bounds requests that try to read or write memory with different tags. MIE explicitly retags memory after it has been freed and reallocated. This step stops bad actors from taking advantage of open vulnerabilities that would allow them to hack into devices.
“Memory Integrity Enforcement is built on the robust foundation provided by our secure memory allocators, coupled with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) in synchronous mode, and supported by extensive Tag Confidentiality Enforcement policies,” an Apple spokesperson stated.
This feature, as you would imagine, has been extremely carefully considered and built out to support synchronous tag checking at scale across expensive workloads. It provides innovative security without compromising the user experience. The technology works quietly behind the scenes to users, but has massively increased their defense from any future harmful threats.
Google’s Shift Towards Rust Programming
Alongside Apple’s development, Google launched a plan to make Rust programming a foundation of their memory safety strategy. The tech giant aims to mitigate vulnerabilities that have historically plagued software development, particularly those that can be exploited by malicious entities.
Google’s Project Zero researcher Mark Brand Twitter to describe the significance of these developments in improving security across the board. He emphasized the usefulness of the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE), released by Arm in 2022 after joining forces with Apple. This technology dramatically improves memory safety on any device. The integration of EMTE into Google’s Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro signifies a major step in addressing these concerns.
“The ability of MTE to detect memory corruption exploitation at the first dangerous access is a significant improvement in diagnostic and potential security effectiveness,” Brand remarked.
Addressing Mercenary Spyware Threats
Mercenary spyware is the threat of the moment, used against everyone from civil society activists to heads of state. These state-of-the-art tools frequently take advantage of memory safety vulnerabilities, enabling attackers to invade devices without being noticed. By introducing MIE, Apple is trying to prevent these types of attacks, further demonstrating its dedication to keeping users secure.
The partnership between Apple and Arm to create EMTE is a clear sign of a proactive approach to better protect devices from growing threats. All of these changes mean that it is much more difficult for attackers to use vulnerabilities as an attack vector. Plus, rigorous enforcement of access to non-tagged memory has a compounding security effect.
“A key weakness of the original MTE specification is that access to non-tagged memory, such as global variables, is not checked by the hardware,” Apple noted, highlighting the improvements made through EMTE’s introduction.