IPhone 17 Comes With ‘Revolutionary’ Security Feature
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In addition to the new chip and improved cameras announced at Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event earlier this week, the iPhone 17 lineup comes with a “revolutionary” security feature designed to protect your device from hackers.
The update, which Apple calls Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), targets spyware like Pegasus , a surveillance program that can extract data from jailbroken iOS or Android mobile devices. By limiting the ability of attackers to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities in Apple devices, MIE is intended to disrupt the surveillance industry and significantly increase the cost of developing and maintaining “spyware for hire.”
What This Security Update Means for iPhone
According to Apple’s security research team, Memory Integrity Enforcement is “the industry’s first comprehensive, always-on memory protection system that covers major attack surfaces” and provides protection for the kernel and more than 70 user processes.
The feature is based on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022, which detects and reports memory corruption errors in real time. It also includes protections against Spectre V1, a speculative execution vulnerability , with minimal performance impact (“nearly zero CPU overhead,” according to Apple).
Memory Integrity protects users by default and is supported by the new A19 and A19 Pro chips found in the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air. Apple is also rolling out memory security updates to older hardware that doesn’t support memory tagging.
As The Verge notes , this update from Apple is similar to the Windows 11 Memory Integrity and MTE features found in Google’s Pixel 8 series and later.