PACMAN is a novel hardware attack that can bypass Pointer Authentication (PAC) on the Apple M1 CPU. We present the following contributions:
- A new way of thinking about compounding threat models in the Spectre age.
- Reverse engineered details of the M1 memory hierarchy.
- A hardware attack to forge kernel PACs from userspace on M1.
PACMAN is what you get when you mix a hardware mitigation for software attacks with microarchitectural side channels. We believe the core idea of PACMAN will be applicable to much more than just PAC.
PACMAN lies in the intersection of software and hardware attacks.
What CPUs are Affected?
We’ve shown PACMAN to work on the Apple M1 CPU.
Who discovered PACMAN?
PACMAN was discovered by researchers at MIT CSAIL.
Co-first authors:
And:
What’s the kernel?
The kernel is the most privileged part of your computer’s operating system. Compromising the kernel means that an attacker can do anything you can do (eg. read any file, see browser data, etc.). PACMAN works across privilege levels, so it works on the kernel from user mode.
Does this attack require physical access?
Nope! We actually did all our experiments over the network on a machine in another room. PACMAN works just fine remotely if you have unprivileged code execution.
Should I be worried?
As long as you keep your software up to date, no. PACMAN is an exploitation technique- on its own it cannot compromise your system. While the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be.
Can I tell if someone is using PACMAN against me?
Much like the Spectre attack our work is based on, PACMAN executes entirely in the speculative regime and leaves no logs. So, “probably not.”
Is PACMAN being used in the wild?
To our knowledge, no.
Does PACMAN have a logo?
Does Apple know?
We reported our findings and proof-of-concept code to Apple, and have been in talks with them since 2021.
See it for yourself.
Check back here for a complete release of all of our code coming soon. The experiments, the kext for doing high resolution timing, our victim kext, and the entire attack code. As well as our Rust-based bare metal execution environment for doing your own experiments on the bare metal.
How does PACMAN work?
PACMAN takes an existing software bug (memory read/ write) and turns it into a more serious exploitation primitive (a pointer authentication bypass), which may lead to arbitrary code execution.
In order to do this, we need to learn what the PAC value is for a particular victim pointer.
PACMAN does this by creating what we call a PAC Oracle, which is the ability to tell if a given PAC matches a specified pointer. The PAC Oracle must never crash if an incorrect guess is supplied. We then brute force all possible PAC values using the PAC Oracle.
A hardware/ software co-attack.
We suppress crashes by performing each PAC guess speculatively to prevent any crashes. We then use a microarchitectural side channel to learn whether the guessed PAC was correct.
A PACMAN Gadget is a code sequence in the victim process that authenticates and tries to use a pointer speculatively. We use an existing memory corruption bug and a PACMAN Gadget to construct the PAC Oracle. The existing memory corruption bug is used to supply guesses to the PACMAN Gadget (by overwriting pointers that only get used speculatively). The PACMAN Gadget executes the test case speculatively, and we learn the results of the test via a microarchitectural side channel.
Overview of the PACMAN PAC Oracle.
PACMAN Gadgets
In principle, a PACMAN Gadget is a code sequence that uses a signed pointer speculatively. This is what a gadget looks like:
if (cond):
verified_ptr <- aut(guess_ptr)
load(verified_ptr)
A data PACMAN Gadget.
The attacker controls the cond variable by triggering the PACMAN Gadget in the victim (eg. by setting a syscall argument). The attacker controls the value of guess_ptr with the memory corruption bug (or, perhaps the attacker could apply a type confusion technique here).
The Side Channel
Our attack can use any microarchitectural structure as our side channel. We went with the translation lookaside buffer (TLB).
We learn whether the PACMAN Gadget was able to speculatively load the pointer or not using the prime+probe technique. We first fill the TLB with an eviction set (a minimal set of addresses required to fill up a particular set in the TLB), and then execute the test case.
We watch the TLB to see if any of our eviction set addresses are evicted. If one was evicted, then it’s likely that the load succeeded (as the loaded address kicked our address out of the TLB). Otherwise, it’s likely our guess was wrong.
Accuracy
As you will see in the paper, we find our attack is quite accurate. Here’s a comparison between the number of eviction set misses we observe using the correct PAC VS the incorrect PAC.
Accuracy of the PACMAN Attack.
(a) Data Pointers, (b) Instruction Pointers.
The X axis is the number of misses (so, the number of things in our eviction set that got kicked out during the test), and the Y axis is the number of test cases where that number of misses was observed.
Get in touch.
Want to learn more about PACMAN? Think we can improve something? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at pacman-attack[at]mit[dot]edu.
Cite PACMAN Today!
@inproceedings{PACMAN:2022,
title = {PACMAN: Attacking ARM Pointer Authentication
with Speculative Execution},
author = {Ravichandran, Joseph and Na, Weon Taek
and Lang, Jay and Yan, Mengjia},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450386104},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3470496.3527429},
doi = {10.1145/3470496.3527429},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual International
Symposium on Computer Architecture},
location = {New York, New York},
series = {ISCA '22}
}
Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan. Pacman: Attacking ARM
Pointer Authentication with Speculative Execution. In Proceedings of the 49th
Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA ’22, New
York, NY, USA, 2022. Association for Computing Machinery.
PACMAN was created in 2021 by researchers from MIT CSAIL.