{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/pacsafe-leveraging-arm-pointer-authentication","title":"CryptSan: Leveraging ARM Pointer Authentication for Memory Safety in C/C++","arxiv_id":"2202.08669","date":"2022-02-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Konrad Hohentanner","Philipp Zieris","Julian Horsch"],"abstract":"Memory safety bugs remain in the top ranks of security vulnerabilities, even after decades of research on their detection and prevention. Various mitigations have been proposed for C/C++, ranging from language dialects to instrumentation. Among these, compiler-based instrumentation is particularly promising, not requiring manual code modifications and being able to achieve precise memory safety. Unfortunately, existing compiler-based solutions compromise in many areas, including performance but also usability and memory safety guarantees. New developments in hardware can help improve performance and security of compiler-based memory safety. ARM Pointer Authentication, added in the ARMv8.3 architecture, is intended to enable hardware-assisted Control Flow Integrity (CFI). But since its operations are generic, it also enables other, more comprehensive hardware-supported runtime integrity approaches. As such, we propose CryptSan, a memory safety approach based on ARM Pointer Authentication. CryptSan uses pointer signatures to retrofit memory safety to C/C++ programs, protecting heap, stack, and globals against temporal and spatial vulnerabilities. We present a full LLVM-based prototype implementation, running on an M1 MacBook Pro, i.e., on actual ARMv8.3 hardware. Our prototype evaluation shows that the system outperforms similar approaches under real-world conditions. This, together with its interoperability with uninstrumented libraries and cryptographic protection against attacks on metadata, makes CryptSan a viable solution for retrofitting memory safety to C/C++ programs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08669v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.08669v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pacsafe-leveraging-arm-pointer-authentication","repo_url":"https://github.com/fraunhofer-aisec/cryptsan","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}