Apple has launched a security research blog.
As part of its 1st technical posts that delves into important memory safety upgrades in XNU, it talks of the kernel at the core of iPhone, iPad, & Mac.
Because nearly all popular user devices today rely on code written in programming languages like C & C++ that are considered “memory-unsafe,” meaning that they don’t provide strong guarantees which prevent certain classes of software bugs, improving memory safety is an important objective for engineering teams across the industry.
On Apple platforms, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes finding & fixing vulnerabilities, developing with safe languages, & deploying mitigations at scale. This series of posts focuses on one specific effort to improve XNU memory safety: hardening the memory allocator. Apple said it had 1st shipped this new hardened allocator, called kalloc_type, in iOS 15, & this year it had expanded its use across systems.
