Opt-in to Arm MTE / MIE
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- Dominant language
- Swift
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Description
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Feature request
Opt in to Arm MTE aka Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE.
MTE is an easy security improvement (at least for users with iPhone 17, which have the hardware for MTE).
To do so, you need to set the appropriate entitlement: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/enabling-enhanced-security-for-your-app
Nextcloud parses potentially attacker controlled data, so enabling MTE/MIE is an easy defense-in-depth.
Important: before enabling MIE in production, you need to thoroughly test on an iPhone 17 that there are no crashes!
If there are crashes "caused" by MTE, these need to be fixed. Note that these crashes are present even without MTE, MTE just makes them visible. So MTE is also a useful bug finding tool.
For background on MTE/MIE, see:
- Apple announcement: security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
- iOS docs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/enabling-enhanced-security-for-your-app
- My blog post 😇 : https://thore.io/posts/2025/09/introduction-to-arm-memory-tagging-extensions/
For Nextcloud Files for Android I made a PR: https://github.com/nextcloud/android/pull/15661
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading Apple's documentation on enabling enhanced security for apps and compare the linked Android pull request for how the related opt-in is handled. The work is done when the iOS app can opt in to Arm MTE/MIE and has been thoroughly tested on an iPhone 17, with any newly exposed crashes fixed before production enablement.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- ios, swift
- Domain
- mobile-dev, security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 42/100