Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement

Apple announced its new suite of memory security improvements from the top of the stack all the way to the bottom, so we dug through what they did and how they did it (performantly).

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FJwOI2PliU

Transcript: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/10/31/apple-mie

Links:

- https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ - Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/operating-system-integrity-sec8b776536b/1/web/1#secd022396fb - https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-of-xnu-memory-safety/ - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/adopting-type-aware-memory-allocation - https://security.apple.com/blog/what-if-we-had-sockpuppet-in-ios16/ - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09272 - https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/11/first-handset-with-mte-on-market.html - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/adopting-type-aware-memory-allocation - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09272 - https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf

"Security Cryptography Whatever" is hosted by Deirdre Connolly (@durumcrustulum), Thomas Ptacek (@tqbf), and David Adrian (@dadrian)