Apple’s latest IPHONE security feature made life more difficult for spyware makers

Be buried in The cheerful oceans announced by Apple This week, Tech Giant also unveiled a new safety technology for the latest iPhone 17 and iPhone Air devices. This new security technology has been made specifically to combat surveillance sellers and the types of weaknesses on which they depend more than others, according to Apple.

This feature is called MIE safety and is designed to help stop memory corruption insects, which is one of the most common weaknesses that spy developers and the forensic medicine makers use for the phone used by the application of the law.

“The well -known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS shares a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: It takes advantage of the weaknesses in the safety of memory, which can be switched, strong, destroyed throughout the industry,” she wrote Apple In the blog post.

Cyber ​​security experts, including people who are hacked and exploited IPHONE, Techcrunch, tells that this new safety technology can make Apple’s latest iPhone devices some of the safest devices on this planet. The result is likely to make a more difficult life for companies that make spyware and Zero day Expectations for planting spyware on the target phone or extracting data from them.

“It is possible that iPhone 17 is now the safest computing environment on this planet, which is still connected to the Internet,” said a security researcher, who has worked to develop and sell zero days and other electronic capabilities of the US government for years.

The researcher told Techcrunch that MIE will raise the cost and time to develop their exploits to the latest iPhone devices, thus increasing their prices to pay customers.

“This is a huge deal,” said the researcher, who asked not to be identified to discuss sensitive matters. “It is not evidence of penetration. But this is the closest that we have to penetrate. None of this will be 100 % perfect. But it raises the risks more than others.”

Jiska Classen, a professor and researcher who studies iOS at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, agreed that MIE will raise the cost of developing monitoring technologies.

Classen said that this is because some of the errors and exploits that the spy companies and programs that are currently operating will stop working as soon as the new iPhone and the implementation of MIE go out.

“I can also imagine that for a certain time window, some mercenary spyware sellers do not have work exploits for the iPhone 17,” Classen said.

“This will make their lives more difficult,” said Patrick Wardel, the researcher. Who runs an emerging company This makes cyber security products specifically for Apple devices. “Of course, it is said with the warning that it is always a cat and mouse game.”

Wardel said that people who are concerned about hacking using spyware should retreat to the new iPhone.

Techcrunch experts spoke to MIE that MIE will reduce the effectiveness of each of the remote breakthroughs, such as those that were launched with spyware such as Pegasus’s NSO Group and Paragon’s Graphite. It will also help protect from physical devices, such as those that are implemented with phone opening devices such as Cellebrite or Graykey.

Take “most exploits”

Most modern devices, including most iPhone devices today, run written programs in programming languages ​​exposed to memory -related errors, which are often called excess or corruption errors. When it is turned on, the memory imbalance can cause memory contents from one application to leak to other areas of the user device where it should not go.

Memory relevant errors can allow malicious infiltrators to reach parts of the device’s memory and control that should not be allowed to do so. Access to cultivating malicious code can be used to access more to a person’s data stored in the phone memory, and implement it via the internet connection to the phone.

MIE aims to defend these types of extensive memory attacks by significantly reducing the surface of the attack in which the weaknesses of the memory can be used.

According to Halvar Flake, an offensive cybersecurity expert, memory corruption is “the vast majority of exploits.”

MIE was built on a technique called Extension of memory signs mode (MTE), originally developed by the arm maker arm. In its blog publication, Apple said over the past five years that she has worked with ARM to expand and improve memory safety features in a product called Endusted Memory Taggent Extension (EMTE).

MIE is the Apple New Safety Technology app, which benefits from Apple fully controls in the technology staple, from programs to devices, unlike many of its competitors in the phone industry.

Google MTE offers For some Android devices; GrapheneOS is also a safe and Android version, also MTE offers.

But other experts say Mai Apple is moving forward. Flake said that Pixel 8 and Grapheneos are “almost compared to”, but the new iPhone will be the “most safe safe.”

MIE works by customizing each piece of the latest iPhone memory with a secret mark, with its own unique password. This means only that applications that contain this secret mark can access the actual memory in the future. If the secret does not match, the security protection and the prohibition of demand will begin, the application will be disrupted, and the event is registered.

This breakdown and record are especially important because it is likely to raise spyware and yellow days, which makes it easy for researchers in Apple and security who are looking for attacks to discover them.

“The wrong step may lead to a potentially recovered container. “The attackers had already had an incentive to avoid memory corruption.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

MIE will be widely operated widely, which means that it will protect applications like Safari and IMessage, which can be entry points for spy tools. But third -party applications will have to implement MIE alone to improve protection for its users. apple I released a copy of EMTE For developers to do this.

In other words, MIE is a big step in the right direction, but it will take some time to see its impact, depending on the number of developers they implement and the number of people who buy new iPhone devices.

Some attackers will definitely remain a means.

“MIE is good and it may be a big thing. It may raise the cost of the attackers significantly and forcing some to get out of the market,” said Friellersdorf. “But there will be many bad actors who still find success and maintain their business.”

“As long as there are buyers there will be sellers,” said Friellersdorf.