ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,562,918, issued on Feb. 24, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Pointer authentication" was invented by Yin Zin Mark Lam (Milpitas, Calif.) and Jeff Gonion (Campbell, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In an embodiment, a processor includes hardware circuitry which may be used to detect that a return address has been modified since it was generated. In response to detecting the modification, the processor may be configured to signal an exception or otherwise initiate error handling to prevent execution at the modified return address. In an embodiment, the processor may perform a cryptographic signature operation on the re...