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Explore a 22-minute presentation that delves into Arm's Guarded Control Stack (GCS) extension introduced in v9.4-a as a defense against Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks. Learn how attackers can exploit return address corruption to chain together code snippets ("gadgets") for malicious purposes, and understand how GCS works as a hardware implementation of the Shadow Stack concept. The talk compares GCS with other mitigations like Stack Protectors, Pointer Authentication, secure programming practices, and CHERI capabilities, while demonstrating step-by-step how GCS prevents attacks by separating the normal stack from the return stack. Gain practical knowledge about implementing this lightweight security feature in your own software with minimal modifications to existing code.
