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by everybodyknows 1953 days ago
Fascinating. Does this confer some of the benefits of ECC RAM, for pointer data only — without the hardware cost?
2 comments

It's for a different purpose. (as in mitigate to some extent security bugs) And isn't an Apple feature only but an Arm one. (that is only rolling out on Cortex with Cortex-A78C and A78AE)

A paper on it from Qualcomm: https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/whitepaper-po...

And there's also MTE which is upcoming.

Some (but I believe the advantage is that it’s much harder to inject valid code from a buffer overflow).
PAC is more about CFI than preventing shellcode injection (which is done through codesigning and memory protection, mostly).