{"guid":"b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561","title":"CHERI and Arm Morello: mitigating the terrible legacy of memory-safety security issues, in practice at scale","subtitle":null,"slug":"emf2024-87-cheri-and-arm-morello","link":"https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2024/87-cheri-and-arm-morello","description":"Computing is riddled with security vulnerabilities, many of which arise from memory safety issues.  Conventional hardware architectures and the C/C++ codebase are chronically prone to exploitable errors - a 75-year-old problem at the heart of computing.  \n\nThis talk will introduce CHERI, showing how (finally?!) we can do better.  The CHERI research project has developed a new architecture+software approach, using unforgeable hardware capabilities to implement pointers. Morello is an Arm experimental platform for evaluation of CHERI to explore its potential for mass-market adoption, part-funded by the UKRI Digital Security by Design programme, and other groups are developing CHERI-enabled RISC-V processors, including Microsoft, Google, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, Codasip, and RISC-V International. \n\nThis talk will introduce the problem, and CHERI and Morello, for a broad audience: the hardware extensions, their potential for fine-grained memory safety and software compartmentalisation, the CHERI software stack, and machine-checked mathematical proof that the architecture design provides the intended security. CHERI complements alternative high-level-language approaches, that would need code to be rewritten from scratch, and we'll talk about the often-low cost of porting code to CHERI. \n\nI'll demo how CHERI prevents exploitable memory safety errors on a Morello box,  running Arm CHERI hardware and a complete CHERI software stack.\n\nThis is joint work by the CHERI and Morello teams at the University of Cambridge, Arm, SRI International, and the University of Edinburgh.","original_language":"eng","persons":["Peter Sewell"],"tags":["87","emf2024","talk","Stage C","2024","Day 2"],"view_count":138,"promoted":false,"date":"2024-05-31T18:30:00.000+02:00","release_date":"2024-08-31T00:00:00.000+02:00","updated_at":"2026-03-31T17:45:06.999+02:00","length":1834,"duration":1834,"thumb_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/emf/2024/87-b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561.jpg","poster_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/emf/2024/87-b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561_preview.jpg","timeline_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/emf/2024/87-b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561.timeline.jpg","thumbnails_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/emf/2024/87-b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561.thumbnails.vtt","frontend_link":"https://media.ccc.de/v/emf2024-87-cheri-and-arm-morello","url":"https://api.media.ccc.de/public/events/b3ecfa2a-5f57-53ff-8442-ab1aea12c561","conference_title":"Electromagnetic Field 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