Beyond Software Defenses: Hardware-assisted CFI on Arm-based systems
Most attacks against software rely on subverting a program's control flow to execute malicious code. Control-flow integrity (CFI) refers to a set of security techniques that aim to limit a program's flow to its original execution path. In this talk we will explore the state-of-the-art in CFI mitigations on Arm-based systems, namely Pointer Authentication (PAuth) and Branch Target Identification (BTI). These are hardware-assisted mechanisms deployed in the latest System-On-Chip architectures, raising the bar against software exploitation.