PAC and BTI in Debian, what are they and why should I care?
Steve Capper
We have recently enabled Pointer Authentication (PAC) and Branch Target Identifiers (BTI) in Debian Sid.
These are two Arm architectural features that aim to improve security.
In this talk I intend to:
- Introduce PAC and BTI architecturally,
- Explain how they are used by software,
- Show how we’ve enabled them in Debian,
- Give some hints on how to debug issues caught by PAC and BTI (should they arise!).
Slides: miniconf-2023-PAC-and-BTI.pdf