Ah! Finally a good explanation through which I understand it a lot better. Thanks for writing. Even privacy conscious and tech savvy people can learn from this.
Am I being too quick and pedantic again or is there something amiss here?
I am seeing this article here:
But not here yet:
Yep, well there are some complicated things taking place behind the scenes that are still being nailed down lol
It’s very good that unlike Lockdown Mode, MIE is an always-on defence that everyone benefits from. Hopefully enablement and adoption is pushed aggressively by Apple so that others in the consumer OS industry are encouraged to follow.
Great article, I was interested to learn the differences between synchronous and asynchronous MTE thanks for writing this 
This also would render the UK ban on lockdown mode quite useless, right?
Not sure what you mean, they banned Advanced Data Protection.
Oh you’re right, I got my wires crossed again.
One thing Apple has not announced, but I hope they do soon, is a feature where Lockdown Mode enables MTE across your system and apps to a much broader degree. As previously discussed, MTE is only enabled selectively outside the kernel on iOS for performance and stability reasons.
I really hope they do because I don’t count on third-party apps to enable MIE (can do it right now), not even Signal considering they don’t even use sandboxing on desktop where it’s available, let alone other attack surface mitigations. Even better, make it a requirement for inclusion in the App Store, obviously with enough time to make sure the crash rate isn’t to high.
Hi,
only A19x CPU (iPhone 17x) are supported. Two questions:
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Having the latest iPads and macBooks they would be still be vulnerable ? So IF somebody sends an iMessage and your iPhone will block it - iPad and macBook might still be infected ?
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As far as I understand the article some things are disabled because of performance issues. Any ideas IF this would / could change with A20+ CPUs in the futures ? What about M5+ CPUs ?
Kind regards
Threat actors are likely to detect the platform before continuing the exploit as running the spyware on a Mac increases the chance of detection a lot.
It’s not implemented across all Apple userland processes yet but they can fill the rest with software updates. It will likely be enabled on Macs as well but Macs are easier to compromise due to it being a traditional desktop environment and other Apple security features like PPL, TXM, SPTM being disabled for this reason.
On previous devices they still have partial MIE from changes that have existed for a while already like Towards the next generation of XNU memory safety: kalloc_type - Apple Security Research.
So there is still a chance those devices benefit from secure allocators on certain kinds of exploits see: https://security.apple.com/assets/image/generated/small_advanced-memory-integrity-dark.png.
Can we please not call it this.
Apple has been using a hardened malloc for years.
Only the A19 chips support MTE.
Right, for clarity’s sake the memory protections have always existed in various forms but it is only correct to say MIE only refers to memory protections (including secure allocators) in combination with EMTE.
I was on the fence about upgrading this year (still on 13 Pro Max) but this may push me towards pulling the trigger.