Qualcomm releases whitepaper detailing pointer authentication on ARMv8.3

ARM recently announced ARMv8.3-A, the 2016 additions to the ARMv8-A architecture. These additions include pointer authentication instructions: “a mechanism for enhanced security associated with pointer authentication.” It is very exciting to see the technology, refined and expanded through discussions and contributions from ARM and its partners, making it into the architecture as the new pointer authentication instructions.

The pointer authentication scheme added to the ARMv8 architecture is a software security primitive that makes it much harder for an attacker to modify protected pointers in memory without being detected. In a new Qualcomm whitepaper, we describe the pointer authentication mechanism including the design criteria, provide a security analysis, and discuss the implementation of certain software security countermeasures such as stack protection and control flow integrity using the pointer authentication primitives.

These new instructions provide a way for quickly verifying the integrity of pointers and data in memory. In addition to the use cases described in the whitepaper, we expect these primitives to pave way to new techniques and opportunities to improve the memory safety of programs and runtime environments.