Steve Capper

An intro to Guarded Control Stack and its current status

Guarded Control Stack is a security feature in Armv9.3 which both provides a security mechanism to protect the control flow of a program and also a means to very quickly capture call-stack information for profiling and optimisation purposes.

Work is underway and being reviewed in communities in the form of kernel, toolchain and library patches.

In this talk I will introduce what GCS is, how it will likely be implemented in Linux and explain where we are in enabling the support in Linux distros.