PACSan: Enforcing Memory Safety Based on ARM PA
Yuan Li, Wende Tan, Zhizheng Lv, Songtao Yang, Mathias Payer, Ying, Liu, Chao Zhang

TL;DR
PACSan is a novel memory sanitizer that enforces spatial and temporal safety with minimal performance overhead by leveraging ARM Pointer Authentication, outperforming existing sanitizers in security and efficiency.
Contribution
PACSan introduces a new approach using ARM PA to seal metadata in pointers, enabling low-overhead, accurate memory safety enforcement without false positives.
Findings
PACSan achieves 0.84x runtime overhead and 1.92x memory overhead.
It has no false positives and fewer false negatives compared to state-of-the-art sanitizers.
PACSan reduces runtime and memory overheads significantly compared to ASan.
Abstract
Memory safety is a key security property that stops memory corruption vulnerabilities. Existing sanitizers enforce checks and catch such bugs during development and testing. However, they either provide partial memory safety or have overwhelmingly high performance overheads. Our novel sanitizer PACSan enforces spatial and temporal memory safety with no false positives at low performance overheads. PACSan removes the majority of the overheads involved in pointer tracking by sealing metadata in pointers through ARM PA (Pointer Authentication), and performing the memory safety checks when pointers are dereferenced. We have developed a prototype of PACSan and systematically evaluated its security and performance on the Magma, Juliet, Nginx, and SPEC CPU2017 test suites, respectively. In our evaluation, PACSan shows no false positives together with negligible false negatives, while…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Cloud Data Security Solutions · Semiconductor materials and devices
