Exploit Development: Unveiling Windows ARM64 Pointer Authentication (PAC)

This blog post is from the original post I made on the Prelude Security blog. The original can be found here. Introduction Pointer Authentication Code, or PAC, is an anti-exploit/memory-corruption feature that signs pointers so their use (as code or data) can be validated at runtime. PAC is available on Armv8.3-A and Armv9.0-A (and later) ARM architectures and leverages virtual addressing in order to store a small cryptographic signature alongside the pointer value. On a typical 64-bit processor...