Today, AMD has released a new chipset driver, version 6.10.17.152. The major highlight of the release is the addition of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) Shadow Stack compatibility support for several of the chipset components as the respective driver executables have now been marked with Microsoft's "/CETCOMPAT" linker.
For those who may not be familiar with it, Microsoft introduced CETCOMPAT to indicate compatibility with CET. It essentially brings hardware-enforced stack protection to protect against control flow hijacking and it was on
Windows 10 20H1 when it was first debuted.
CET introduces Shadow Stack and Indirect Branch Targeting (IBT) features. The former helps defend a system against Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks while the latter protects against Call or Jump Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks.
CET is able to do so by checking the normal program stack against a hardware-stored copy (the Shadow Stack) to ensure that the integrity of return addresses is maintained. In simple words, Shadow Stack stops malware from taking over the process steps of legitimate software as it flags potentially compromised software from executing.
AMD Ryzen CPUs since Zen 3 or Ryzen 5000 series have supported the Shadow Stack feature. Thus, newer Ryzen 6000 (Zen 3+), Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) and Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) are also compatible.
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