The iPhone 17’s new security upgrade is making spyware makers sweat

The iPhone 17 just got announced on Tuesday, September 9. The new lineup features advanced memory protections that are likely to cause some serious trouble for malicious users who are developing spyware. 
The iPhone 17 lineup has a new security enhancement called Memory Integrity Enforcement or MIE. Apple has collaborated with ARM to make this feature. It basically ensures there are no memory corruption issues on iPhones.

MIE creates tags for specific portions of the iPhone memory. Basically, only apps that have access to these tags can use the device’s memory. Apps that lack the necessary tags will crash instead. 

Furthermore, there’s also Tag Confidentiality Enforcement, which would keep attackers from getting access to these codes using side-channel attacks.

MIE is likely to cause serious trouble to spyware apps that rely on memory corruption. With this new protection system, it would become more difficult to break into an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro, including with hardware-based tools. 

Although MIE doesn’t make the iPhone 17 completely immune to exploits, an anonymous security researcher claims that it’s the closest thing right now to hack-proof tech that connects to the internet. 

All in all, it is expected that spyware developers will struggle to offer exploits for the iPhone 17 for quite some time. Potentially, according to Matthias Frielingsdorf, the vice president of research at iVerify, the existence of the MIE tech can even drive some spyware makers off the market.

Although this doesn’t necessarily mean that malicious users will give up altogether – they never do – but for sure, they will have a hard time with the iPhone 17 models. 

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