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gw2 | 1 year ago

I may be wrong, but that issue is specific to PA. Shadow stacks can't be tampered with. Smartphones probably went with PA because shadow stacks require more memory. My use case specifically is targeting desktop/server systems with Clang CFI and Intel CET.

Note that I am not very knowledgeable in security, and I am really willing to be educated but it feels like most of the replies to my comments are just trying to prove me wrong.

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saagarjha|1 year ago

PAC as implemented is stronger than shadow stacks, as it aims to provide CFI for more cases and not just function returns. Overwriting function pointers gives code execution under shadow stacks (which only protect return addresses) but is much more difficult to do so when the pointers are signed. Mobile platforms are very memory sensitive (one of the major reasons that MTE hasn't rolled out, for example) but I don't really see them wanting to adopt shadow stacks.

I can't really speak to your comments as you haven't posted many of them. I'm not here to prove you wrong but just to share my views on these mitigations. I'm not an expert by any means but I do get to think about these for work so I can usually do at least a quick once-over to try to figure out how effective they might be.

gw2|1 year ago

Thanks for your reply.

> Overwriting function pointers gives code execution under shadow stacks

As you are probably aware, there are two kinds of CFI - forward-edge and backward-edge. Forward-edge CFI prevents tampered function pointers, vtables and such from being invoked. Whereas backward-edge CFI protects does the same for return addresses. Clang's and MSVC's (CFG) implementations of CFI only provide forward-edge protection, hence the need for shadow stacks. Without hardware support, shadow stacks can not be prevented from tampered, which is why Intel (CET) and AMD added shadow stacks.

> Mobile platforms are very memory sensitive

Agreed. I'd guess this applies to embedded too. But all things considered, I do hold the opinion that language-level memory safety is being overplayed a lot.