Memory safety has been a concern for a long time in software implementation. The lack of memory safety has led to the majority of vulnerabilities in both Operating Systems and Applications. For example, the Chromium project has pointed out that 70% of critical vulnerabilities are related to memory safety. In recent years, CHERI has been promoted as a promising solution to address the memory safety problem at the hardware level. CHERI aims at providing fine-grained memory management at the hardware level which is adaptable to potentially unsafe memory programming languages such as C/C++. According to a recent study by Microsoft, CHERI enables us to mitigate at least two-thirds of all memory safety vulnerabilities. In this talk, we look at a quick introduction to CHERI and its under-the-hood protection principles.
Hoang Nguyen: A quick introduction to CHERI
A113, Engineering Central