Live data from Hacker News

Memory Integrity Enforcement

security.apple.com

11–20 of 259 posts

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#11

I think hackers are not ready for the idea that unhackable hardware might actually be here. Hardware that will never have an exploit found someday, never be jailbroken, never have piracy, outside of maybe nation-state attacks. Xbox One, 2012? Never hacked. Nintendo Switch 2, 2025? According to reverse engineers... flawlessly secure microkernel and secure monitor built over the Switch 1 generation. Meanwhile NVIDIA's…

Saying "never" is too bold. But it's definitely getting immensely difficult.

There are still plenty of other flaws besides memory unsafety to exploit. I doubt that we'll see like a formally proven mainstream OS for a long time.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#13
post #6

Meanwhile, Google is doing all it can to weaken Android safety by withholding images and patches, also by failing to fully segregate applications from each other. The evidence is linked below: (1) AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-356... (2) Privacy-Focused GrapheneOS Warns Google Is Locking Down Android: https://cybe…

Look, I’m an iOS user but this seems like flame-bait to me without any technical details. I’ve seen a lot of Google blog posts about security improvements over the years so that seems like a very sweeping assertion if you’re not going to support it.

Recent discussion on 90-day embargo for security updates, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45158523

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#15

I think hackers are not ready for the idea that unhackable hardware might actually be here. Hardware that will never have an exploit found someday, never be jailbroken, never have piracy, outside of maybe nation-state attacks. Xbox One, 2012? Never hacked. Nintendo Switch 2, 2025? According to reverse engineers... flawlessly secure microkernel and secure monitor built over the Switch 1 generation. Meanwhile NVIDIA's…

> iPhone? iOS 17 and 18 have never been jailbroken; now we introduce MIE.

So far as you know. There's a reason they call them zero-day vulnerabilities.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#16
post #6

Meanwhile, Google is doing all it can to weaken Android safety by withholding images and patches, also by failing to fully segregate applications from each other. The evidence is linked below: (1) AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-356... (2) Privacy-Focused GrapheneOS Warns Google Is Locking Down Android: https://cybe…

Look, I’m an iOS user but this seems like flame-bait to me without any technical details. I’ve seen a lot of Google blog posts about security improvements over the years so that seems like a very sweeping assertion if you’re not going to support it.

I haven't read the articles posted (and I don't know how credible piunikaweb and cyberinsider are) but here is the first-ish hand information from GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/115164133992525834

> ... Google recently made incredibly misguided changes to Android security updates. Android security patches are (now) almost entirely quarterly instead of monthly to make it easier for OEMs. They're giving OEMs 3-4 months of early access.. Google's existing system for distributing security patches to OEMs was already incredibly problematic. Extending 1 month of early access to 4 months is atrocious. This applies to all of the patches in the bulletins.

> ... The existing system should have been moving towards shorter broad disclosure of patches instead of 30 days. Moving in the opposite direction with 4 months of early access is extraordinarily irresponsible. ...Their 3-4 month embargo has an explicit exception for binary-only releases of patches. We're fully permitted to release the December 2025 patches this month in a release but not the source code.

> Nearly all OEMs were failing to ship the monthly security patch backports despite how straightforward it is. The backports alone are not even particularly complete patches. They're only the High and Critical severity Android patches and a small subset of external patches for the Linux kernel, etc. Getting the full Android patches requires the latest stable releases.

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#19

I think hackers are not ready for the idea that unhackable hardware might actually be here. Hardware that will never have an exploit found someday, never be jailbroken, never have piracy, outside of maybe nation-state attacks. Xbox One, 2012? Never hacked. Nintendo Switch 2, 2025? According to reverse engineers... flawlessly secure microkernel and secure monitor built over the Switch 1 generation. Meanwhile NVIDIA's…

Israeli companies and agencies will surely find a way.. even if software/hardware might really be unhackable, it seems people will never be..

Re: Memory Integrity Enforcement

#20
This is really impressive.

It’s my understanding that this won’t protect you in the case where the attacker has a chance to try multiple times.

The approach would be something like: go out of bounds far enough to skip the directly adjacent object, or do a use after free with a lot of grooming, so that you get a a chance of getting a matching tag. The probability of getting a matching tag is 1/16.

But this post doesn’t provide enough details for me to be super confident about what I’m saying. Time will tell! If this is successful then the remaining exploit chains will have to rely on logic bugs, which would be super painful for the bad guys

Post reply on HN