Finding Truth in the Shadows
Elastic Security Labs analyzes Windows Hardware Stack Protection (HSP), a hardware-backed exploit mitigation using Intel CET and AMD Shadow Stack to prevent ROP attacks. Beyond exploit mitigation, the research demonstrates three additional benefits: improved debugging of stack corruption, potential performance gains for kernel-mode stack walking, and a novel detection technique (ShadowStackWalk PoC) that defeats thread stack spoofing defenses like ThreadStackSpoofer and CallStackSpoofer.