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arXiv · 1909.05747

Protecting the stack with PACed canaries

Hans Liljestrand·Zaheer Gauhar·Thomas Nyman·Jan-Erik Ekberg·N. Asokan
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Abstract

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.

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Hans Liljestrand, Zaheer Gauhar, Thomas Nyman, Jan-Erik Ekberg, N. Asokan. 2019-09-12. Protecting the stack with PACed canaries. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05747

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