Improving software memory safety is a key security objective for engineering teams across the industry. Here we begin a journey into the XNU kernel at the core of iOS and explore the intricate work our engineering teams have done to harden the memory allocator and make our software much more difficult to exploit.
Earlier this year, I discovered a flaw in XNU, which is the kernel that Apple uses on both macOS and iOS. While it's not a particularly complicated flaw, I wanted to explain how I discovered it and how it works, both so that I can motivate others and so that they can learn from my discovery.
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 th...
Greetings, traveler! Recently, conversations have emerged in the developer community suggesting that Apple might be introducing Rust into the internals of iOS. Some even claim that core system components are being rewritten in Rust, shifting away from Objective-C or Swift. Given Rust’s reputation for memory safety and reliability in systems programming, these rumors are not
