[strcat]

There's a difference between Apple doing good integration of MTE and the work they're doing being truly novel. ARM MTE is not the only memory tagging implementation. Apple getting ARM to add something many people have wanted from elsewhere is useful, but it doesn't make it their idea. The fact is that they're not at all the first to deploy MTE to production and MTE was not the first deployment of hardware memory tagging to production. Their integration is better than what Google offers in Android 16 themselves. Unlike Apple, Google's mobile OS is open source and not limited to what Google does themselves. There are ways their integration is better than what's implemented elsewhere and also ways that it's worse. For one thing, it's deployed for a narrower set of components. What's implemented elsewhere is not static and will improve. MTE has been deployed in production in GrapheneOS for 2 years without significant hardware changes yet, but those are coming.

[saagarjha]

Apple did not just “get ARM to add something” they got dozens if not hundreds of engineers to think really hard about how to roll out MTE with no performance impact on all their critical attack surface in a way that actually targets specific exploit strategies rather than just going “oh ok our allocator has tags now”. Google (and Android) took a very different approach. Of course it’s very possible Apple messed up and their implementation is not as secure as it was designed to be but they did put significant effort in many areas that I feel are novel.