New Pacman Vulnerability Affecting Apple Silicon Cpus
Pointer Authentication is a mechanism available on ARM-based processors, including Apple, that aims to enable the detection and protection against unexpected changes in markers in memory. Pointer authentication works by offering a special CPU command to add a cryptographic signature – or PAC – to unused high-order bits of a pointer before pointer storage. Another instruction removes and validates the signature after reading the pointer behind the memory. This mechanism makes it possible to detect when a value has been violated between write and read by checking the signature....