After hardening: Apple donates iPhone 17 to civil society organizations

Apple has announced a continuation of its Cybersecurity Grant for members of civil society. The previous program had offered $10 million to organizations that help activists, journalists, and civil rights activists defend themselves against or investigate highly targeted mercenary spyware attacks. Now, according to Apple, a “special initiative” is planned. iPhone 17 devices are to be distributed specifically to threatened people from civil society – a total of 1000 pieces, according to the company in a communication.

MIE to fend off advanced attacks

Like all iPhones of this year, the iPhone 17 has a new function for memory protection, the so-called Memory Integrity Enforcement, or MIE for short. It should also be able to prevent complex exploit chains that take advantage of memory errors in good time. The necessary hardware component is in the A19 and A19 Pro, which are installed in the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max and Air. According to Apple, it had also succeeded in stopping attacks via speculative CPU instruction execution such as Spectre V1 without this being accompanied by a performance drop. iOS 26 also contains new protective measures, but they only take full effect with the new devices.

“To quickly make this revolutionary and industry-leading defense available to members of civil society who may be targeted by targeted spyware, we will provide a thousand iPhone 17 devices to civil society organizations that can share them with vulnerable users,” the company writes. Apple has not yet announced further details about the distribution process – such as which organizations will receive devices and how. “This initiative reflects our ongoing commitment to bringing our most advanced security measures to those who need them most,” the iPhone maker added.

Intercepting spyware at an early stage

MIE combines various approaches to prevent malware from penetrating memory areas that they are not allowed to access. According to Apple, an offensive research team was also involved in the development of MIE, which also practically attacked the system over five years and hardened it against attacks found.

Various real-world attack scenarios that Apple describes – via iMessage, Safari and kernel exploits – could be prevented by MIE, which fuels the hope that vulnerabilities can be intercepted very early in the exploit chain. Exploitable memory errors occur in code all the time, even after extensive auditing.