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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2202.08669 (cs)
[Submitted on 17 Feb 2022]

Title:PACSafe: Leveraging ARM Pointer Authentication for Memory
Safety in C/C++

Authors:Konrad Hohentanner, Philipp Zieris, Julian Horsch
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    Abstract: Memory safety bugs remain in the top ranks of security
    vulnerabilities, even after decades of research on their
    detection and prevention. Various mitigations have been proposed
    for C/C++, ranging from language dialects to instrumentation.
    Among these, compiler-based instrumentation is particularly
    promising, not requiring manual code modifications and being able
    to achieve precise memory safety. Unfortunately, existing
    compiler-based solutions compromise in many areas, including
    performance but also usability and memory safety guarantees. New
    developments in hardware can help improve performance and
    security of compiler-based memory safety. ARM Pointer
    Authentication, added in the ARMv8.3 architecture, is intended to
    enable hardware-assisted Control Flow Integrity. But since its
    operations are relatively generic, it also enables other, more
    comprehensive hardware-supported runtime integrity approaches. As
    such, we propose PACSafe, a memory safety approach based on ARM
    Pointer Authentication. PACSafe uses pointer signatures to
    retrofit full memory safety to C/C++ programs, protecting heap,
    stack, and globals against temporal and spatial vulnerabilities.
    We present a full, LLVM-based prototype implementation, running
    on an M1 MacBook Pro, i.e., on actual ARMv8.3 hardware. Our
    prototype evaluation shows that the system outperforms similar
    approaches under real-world conditions. This, together with its
    compatibility with uninstrumented libraries and cryptographic
    protection against attacks on metadata, makes PACSafe a viable
    solution for retrofitting memory safety to C/C++ programs.

Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Programming Languages
          (cs.PL); Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as:  arXiv:2202.08669 [cs.CR]
          (or arXiv:2202.08669v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08669
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Julian Horsch [view email]
[v1] Thu, 17 Feb 2022 14:04:01 UTC (369 KB)
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