The latest efforts to harden software against exploitable memory corruption vulnerabilities come in the form of hardware-assisted control flow integrity and pointer authentication. Most notably, these ISA extensions are commonly referred to as Pointer Authentication (PAC) on ARM and Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) on Intel.

With a growing number of consumer devices embracing this generation of security mitigations, it is naturally a point of interest for security enthusiasts to become familiar with how to bypass these hardening technologies. In this post, we will cover the basics of exploiting a simple ‘Hello World!’ buffer overflow against an interactive PAC protected ARM64 binary hosted on our browser-based educational platform.

PAC thwarting a classic stack buffer overflow