PACMAN: attacking ARM pointer authentication with speculative execution

This paper studies the synergies between memory corruption vulnerabilities and speculative execution vulnerabilities. We leverage speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity. We present PACMAN, a novel attack methodology that speculatively leaks PAC verification results via micro-architectural side channels without causing any crashes. Our attack removes the primary barrier to conducting control-flow hijacking attacks on a platform protected using Pointer Authentication.

We demonstrate multiple proof-of-concept attacks of PACMAN on the Apple M1 SoC, the first desktop processor that supports ARM Pointer Authentication. We reverse engineer the TLB hierarchy on the Apple M1 SoC and expand micro-architectural side-channel attacks to Apple processors. Moreover, we show that the PACMAN attack works across privilege levels, meaning that we can attack the operating system kernel as an unprivileged user in userspace.

• Security and privacy → Side-channel analysis and countermeasures; Hardware reverse engineering.