Protecting the stack with PACed canaries

09/12/2019

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by   Hans Liljestrand, et al.

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HUAWEI Technologies Co., Ltd.

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aalto

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Stack canaries remain a widely deployed defense against memory corruption attacks. Despite their practical usefulness, canaries are vulnerable to memory disclosure and brute-forcing attacks. We propose PCan, a new approach based on ARMv8.3-A pointer authentication (PA), that uses dynamically-generated canaries to mitigate these weaknesses and show that it provides more fine-grained protection with minimal performance overhead.