Demystifying Pointer Authentication on Apple M1

Pointer Authentication (PA) was introduced by ARMv8.3 to safeguard the integrity of pointers. While the ARM specification allows vendors to implement and customize PA, Apple has tailored it on their hardware to protect iPhones and Macs with M-series chips. Since its debut, Apple PA has been considered effective in defeating pointer corruption. However, its details have not been publicly disclosed.

To shed light on Apple PA customization, this paper conducts an in-depth reverse engineering study focused on Apple PA's hardware implementation and usage on the M1 chip. We develop a reverse engineering framework and propose novel techniques to uncover and confirm our new findings.

Our study uncovers that Apple PA has implemented several hardware-based diversifiers to counter pointer forgery attacks across various domains, which is previously unknown to researchers outside of Apple. We further discover that the XNU kernel (the kernel used by iOS and macOS) incorporates nine types of modifiers for signing and authenticating pointers and customized key management based on Apple PA hardware. Based on our in-depth understanding of Apple PA, we perform a security analysis of PA-based control-flow integrity and data-flow integrity in the XNU kernel, identifying four attack surfaces. Apple has fixed these issues in a security update and assigned us a new CVE.