Conclusion

The industry-leading security of iPhone means that the vast majority of our users never face system-level attacks on their devices. Our work on memory safety is aimed primarily at the mercenary spyware and surveillance industry, which spends many millions of dollars to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities and target a small number of individuals because of who they are and what they do. Over the past five years, we developed a comprehensive approach to memory safety that integrates the best of our hardware and software capabilities, and today’s announcement is the culmination of this ambitious vision. With the introduction of the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air, we’re excited to deliver Memory Integrity Enforcement: the industry’s first ever, comprehensive, always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces — including the kernel and over 70 userland processes — built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) and supported by secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections.