Linux and CHERI: Back to the Future - Carl Shaw, Codasip

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Linux and CHERI: Back to the Future - Carl Shaw, Codasip

Building on the 1960s security concept of a capability - an unforgable token of authority - CHERI brings a new, practical approach to capabilities for fine grained memory protection to either replace or complement MMU-based virtual memory. CHERI has been in development for nearly 15 years and supports multiple architectures, with a research silicon implementation called Morello having been produced by Arm. It is now being commercialized and proposed as a new RISC-V standard extension, with early RISC-V processor designs now available commercially and in open source implementations. This talk will briefly cover the history of capability machines, what CHERI is and how it is implemented, and how it can provide memory-safety and additional security to Linux.