MIE: New memory protection only in iPhone 17 & Co.
A19 and A19 Pro are not only faster, but also have hardware-based protective measures against memory attacks. Backporting is not possible.
iPhones of the 2025 vintage: All equipped with A19 or A19 Pro.
(Image: Apple)
Apple's chip department has integrated hardware improvements into the new 2025 iPhones that are also designed to prevent complex attacks on the devices' memory management. The so-called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is “the culmination of unprecedented design and development work that has spanned half a decade and combines the unique strengths of Apple's silicon hardware with the advanced security of our operating system,” the company writes in a previously little-noticed blog post published in September.
iOS 26 is more secure, but only the new hardware has all the features
For the first time in the industry, the company has succeeded in offering permanent protection of storage security on devices without having to accept performance restrictions. The problem is that the technology is partially molded into the hardware, meaning it only works with A19 and A19 Pro in iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and Air. Although improvements have also been made in iOS 26, it is apparently not possible to transfer the hardware protection measures (backporting) to older SoCs.
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Appleemphasizess that there has not yet been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhones. “The only system-level iOS attacks we have seen in practice have come from so-called mercenary spyware, which is far more complex than normal cybercrime and malware targeting end users.” Mercenary spyware is normally used primarily by governments and intelligence services due to the high effort and costs involved. According to Apple, it only affects “a very small number of specific people”. However, it is not really that rare, as can be seen from the warning messages that Apple itself often issues to those impacted.
Fending off Spectre without a performance penalty?
MIE combines various approaches to prevent malware from penetrating memory areas that it is not authorised to access. This includes the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) published by ARM in 2019, which Apple expanded in 2022 together with the chip company to become the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE). Additional measures in the MIE package are intended to stop attacks via speculative CPU instruction execution such as Spectre V1, among other things, without causing enormous drops in performance. According to Apple, an offensive research team was also involved in the development of MIE, which also practically attacked the system over five years and hardened it against the attacks found.
According to the company, the researchers succeeded in implementing MIE in the A19 and A19 Pro in such a way that synchronized tag checking could also be implemented for heavy workloads with “minimal performance impact”. However, the company has not yet revealed exactly how this was possible. But it should work: A19 and A19 Pro also brought performance gains. Various real-world attack scenarios described by Apple—about iMessage, Safari and kernel exploits—could be prevented by MIE, which fuels the hope that gaps can be intercepted very early in the exploit chain.
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