ARMv8.3 adds a hardware-assisted mechanism to detect illicit modification of pointer values, which can mitigate attacks against control flow such as ROP and JOP.
The pointer authentication adds new instructions to sign and authenticate pointers using a Pointer Authentication Code (PAC). These instructions are simple to integrate into compilers and JITs while also being backwards compatible, enabling protected code to function on hardware where the feature is not available.
This presentation will provide an overview of the extension, the use thereof, and Linux enablement.
