Apple is touting a major security upgrade for its recently unveiled iPhone 17 devices, which come with always-on protection called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) aimed at making it more difficult to get spyware onto the four new models. The result of five years of research and development, MIE leverages both Apple silicon and iOS software. The company is calling the results “the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.” The upgrade targets “mercenary spyware,” the origins of which are “vastly more complex than regular cybercriminal activity and consumer malware.”

While Apple claims there has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against the iPhone, it has observed “system-level iOS attacks” in the wild via tools like Pegasus from mercenary spyware purveyors, whose exploits an Apple blog post says are “interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry,” including on Windows and Android platforms.

MIE helps to prevent “memory corruption bugs, which are some of the most common vulnerabilities exploited by spyware developers and makers of phone forensic devices used by law enforcement,” writes TechCrunch, which says Apple’s new security tool “is likely to make life harder for the companies that make spyware and zero-day exploits for planting spyware on a target’s phone or extracting data from them.”

Apple unveiled its iPhone 17 series earlier this month. Media observers report that the MIE security leap was overshadowed by flashier features like more capable cameras and the faster new A19 Pro chipset. The four iPhone 17 models ship September 19.

Wired notes a recent trend toward a “proactive” security strategy involving special programming languages that make it “structurally impossible for software to contain these vulnerabilities, rather than attempting to avoid introducing them or catch all of them.” Apple’s Swift programming language, which dates back to 2014, is just such a “memory-safe” approach, and the company has continued to update it over the years.

Apple has been “attempting to strategically overhaul and rewrite existing code in the memory-safe language to make its systems more secure,” Wired reports, explaining that “this reflects the challenge of memory safety across the industry, because even if new code is written more securely, the world’s software was all written in memory-unsafe languages for decades.”

“While, in general, Apple’s locked down ecosystem has so far succeeded at preventing widespread malware attacks against iPhones, motivated attackers, particularly spyware makers, do still develop complex iOS exploit chains at high cost to target specific victims’ iPhones,” Wired adds.

Related:
Apple’s New Memory Integrity Enforcement System Deals a Huge Blow to Spyware Developers, CyberScoop, 9/10/25
Apple’s New iPhone 17 Makes Signing Safer for Frequent Crypto Users, Cointelegraph, 9/11/25