Alongside its new iPhone 17 and iPhone Air, Apple has quietly introduced a major security feature that could shake up the spyware industry. The feature, called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), is designed to block memory corruption bugs, which are the most common entry point for surveillance tools and forensic phone-cracking devices.
According to Apple, mercenary spyware campaigns across iOS, Windows, and Android all rely heavily on memory safety flaws, which makes MIE a direct countermeasure. Built on Arm’s Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE), Apple’s implementation uses secret tags for every block of memory. Only apps with the matching tag can access that memory. If the tag is wrong, the app crashes and the attempt is logged, giving defenders more visibility into attacks.
Cybersecurity researchers say this could make the iPhone 17 one of the most secure devices available today. “The iPhone 17 is probably now the most secure computing environment on the planet that is still connected to the internet,” one veteran security researcher told TechCrunch, adding that the feature will raise both the cost and time required to build zero-day exploits.
Jiska Classen, a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute, said MIE will likely invalidate some of the spyware exploits already in circulation. “I could also imagine that for a certain time window some mercenary spyware vendors don’t have working exploits for the iPhone 17,” she said.
Patrick Wardle, founder of an Apple-focused security startup, called the feature a game-changer. “This will make their life arguably infinitely more difficult. Of course, it’s always a cat-and-mouse game,” he noted. Wardle also advised users worried about spyware to upgrade to the new iPhones.
Experts say MIE will make it harder to deploy both remote spyware, such as NSO Group’s Pegasus, and physical hacks that rely on tools like Cellebrite or Graykey. Halvar Flake, an offensive security expert, described memory corruption bugs as “the vast majority of exploits,” highlighting the scale of Apple’s move.
The feature will be enabled by default on core apps like Safari and iMessage, which are common targets of spyware campaigns. Third-party developers will need to integrate support for MIE themselves using Apple’s developer tools.
While Google offers a similar memory tagging feature in Pixel devices and GrapheneOS, experts say Apple’s implementation is broader and more integrated because of its control over both hardware and software.
MIE is not a guarantee of total security, but it significantly raises the bar. “It’s not hack proof. But it’s the closest thing we have to hack proof,” the anonymous researcher said. Matthias Frielingsdorf of iVerify added that while some attackers may still succeed, the cost will rise so high that certain spyware vendors could be forced out of the market.
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