Apple have created and embraced an entire language (Swift) around the idea that things like memory safety are important, but you cannot just rewrite an entire operating system overnight into a new language.
Swift is not (currently) a viable replacement for C.
I'm not saying they should rewrite the entire OS immediately, but: given the pace at which they're able to pump out new marketable features; the massive deployed base of iOS devices; and the sensitivity of the data that is kept on those devices, I would argue that they damn well better have a long-term plan to replace their bug-ridden kernel and other important low-level systems, with code that isn't vulnerable to classes of bugs that have been solved for decades and are frequently exploited in the wild. And I'm not just talking about Apple here.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/memory-safe-iboot-i...
I think they are slowly going in that direction, e.g. by moving drivers to user space with DriverKit (which AFAIK unfortunately, still uses C++).
Presumably because they also said
> iOS is hundreds of millions of lines of C and C++
and Apple did write a whole new operating system that way not so long ago despite the well-known safety issues of doing so. If any company in the world has the resources to incrementally rewrite an entire operating system with huge numbers of active users today so that the attack surface becomes progressively smaller, it's Apple.
It's not as if no-one knew about the dangers of writing security-sensitive systems in C or C++ in 2007 or as if the Internet was some new idea where no-one understood that bad people would try to remotely compromise your system using it. Apple might not yet have realised how important the iPhone was going to become back then but they were doing very well by a decade ago and they were huge by five years ago.
Maybe in 2007 it made sense to build iOS on an existing platform and use the normal systems programming languages. Why couldn't more recent development of potentially vulnerable components have been done using safer technologies though?
Take a look at the long list of security issues fixed by last week's iOS 14.7 update[1] and tell me how many of the vulnerable systems could have been written or rewritten to use more secure technologies. Look for terms like "use-after-free", "buffer overflow" and "out-of-bounds read".
Then there is the iOS 14.7.1 update we're discussing today. Yet again this seems to be about fixing a memory corruption issue in a kernel extension written in an unsafe language that has a track record of exposing vulnerabilities. When do we start learning from those mistakes?
[1] https://www.cybernewsgroup.co.uk/apple-issues-urgent-iphone-...
Multics had a DoD validated security profile higher than any UNIX, it was written in Acme Corporation PL/I.
The original Mac OS and Lisa were written in Fluffy Object Pascal.
Apparently many airplanes get to fly in a toy language created around 1983.
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