ARM pointer authentication

ARM pointer authentication

Posted Apr 6, 2017 11:39 UTC (Thu) by MarkRutland (subscriber, #74197)
Parent article: ARM pointer authentication

Great article! Especially given how sparse information is on this topic today.

A couple of minor clarifications:

• The "general" key should be the "generic" key.
• PAC* and AUT* are families of instructions, rather than specific instructions. For example, GCC uses PACIASP and AUTIASP for authenticating the return address.

Another thing that may be worth noting is that the instructions used by GCC are treated as NOPs by existing CPUs. Libraries and applications using those instructions will function on existing hardware (albeit without authentication). At some point, distributions might consider building with authentication unconditionally

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