The paper states that the Pointer Authentication module was designed by ARM and released in 2017 as part of the ARMv8 Instruction Set. Usually what happens with ARM chips is a manufacturer (Apple in this case, though there are a bunch of others) will license a particular ARM design and package it with various other peripherals (eg. display controllers, USB, SATA, etc...) and memory to produce a single System On Chip (the M1 chip in this case). The manufacturer owns the SoC design, but part of that design is the CPU portion they licensed from ARM.
It's possible that ARM developed this sort of functionality at the behest of Apple (I've heard rumors that Intel has developed certain x86 functions at the behest of Amazon), but this looks like it's an ARM flaw rather than an Apple one.
The paper states that the Pointer Authentication module was designed by ARM and released in 2017 as part of the ARMv8 Instruction Set. Usually what happens with ARM chips is a manufacturer (Apple in this case, though there are a bunch of others) will license a particular ARM design and package it with various other peripherals (eg. display controllers, USB, SATA, etc...) and memory to produce a single System On Chip (the M1 chip in this case). The manufacturer owns the SoC design, but part of that design is the CPU portion they licensed from ARM.
It's possible that ARM developed this sort of functionality at the behest of Apple (I've heard rumors that Intel has developed certain x86 functions at the behest of Amazon), but this looks like it's an ARM flaw rather than an Apple one.