Comment by nvm0n2
2 years ago
Sure. Rewrite sensitive parts of their stack in memory safe languages. They have Swift after all. A lot of the iOS security improvements over time have really been more like mitigations that try to contain the damage when the giant of pile of decades old C gets exploited.
That is exactly their plan. Swift could always link into C applications, and they have recently come out with C++ interoperability [1] so things like WebKit etc. can start having parts re-written or new parts written from the start in Swift so they can gradually replace C and C++ codebases instead of trying to rewrite everything (which sucks because even for things much, much less complex than WebKit, you can have a team working for three years working on a replacement and it’ll have less features than the original had when you started).
They’re even working on an embedded subset for embedded devices so things like microcontrollers like battery management, the Secure Enclave etc. can run it.
1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw
They’re working on it, but a memory-safe language doesn’t help you in some of the surface that the attackers exploited here.
I think memory safety + integer overflow checking by default would have blocked many of these. Not the hardware mitigation disable but getting to the point where that matters required some safety problems that can be excluded by better languages.