Memory Integrity Enforcement

This is great, and a bit of a buried lede. Some of the economics of mercenary spyware depend on chains with interchangeable parts, and countermeasures targeting that property directly are interesting.

That's Apple and here is Google (who have been at memory safety since the early Chrome/Android days):

  Google folks were responsible for pushing on Hardware MTE ... It originally came from the folks who also did work on ASAN, syzkaller, etc ... with the help and support of folks in Android ... ARM/etc as well.

  I was the director for the teams that created/pushed on it ... So I'm very familiar with the tradeoffs.
  
  ...

  Put another way - the goal was to make it possible to use have the equivalent of ASAN be flipped on and off when you want it.

  Keeping it on all the time as a security mitigation was a secondary possibility, and has issues besides memory overhead.

  For example, you will suddenly cause tons of user-visible crashes. But not even consistently. You will crash on phones with MTE, but not without it (which is most of them).

  This is probably not the experience you want for a user.

  For a developer, you would now have to force everyone to test on MTE enabled phones when there are ~1mn of them. This is not likely to make developers happy.

  Are there security exploits it will mitigate? Yes, they will crash instead of be exploitable. Are there harmless bugs it will catch? Yes.

  ...

  As an aside - It's also not obvious it's the best choice for run-time mitigation.

Google Security (ex: TAG & Project Zero) do so much to tackle CSVs but with MTE the mothership dropped the ball so hard.