2022 - Life and death of an iOS attacker by Luca Todesco

Overview: Luca Todesco presents at Hexacon on the life and death of an iOS attacker, surveying Apple's aggressive security hardening and its impact on jailbreak and exploit development.

Key Topics: Pointer authentication codes (PAC) on A12+ devices; iOS CFI properties preventing pointer substitution; Apple's rapid security improvements; the shrinking window for public jailbreaks; and ideas for future research directions.

Technical Details: Todesco explains PAC tagging pointers with unpredictable signatures to block traditional exploitation, and how compile-time CFI instrumentation protects function pointers and return addresses. He discusses techniques that died and potential new approaches.

Takeaways: Apple's security investment has dramatically raised exploitation costs. Researchers must adapt to PAC, CFI, and other mitigations while identifying remaining attack surfaces.