Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:08, 25 January 2025

Revision as of 22:18, 25 January 2025

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By 2020 it became evident that software vendors were reluctant to port their software without hardware vendor support, while hardware vendors were unwilling to produce chips without sufficient customer demand. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) launched the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) programme<ref name="dsbd">{{cite web |author=<!-- not stated --> |year=2020 |title=Digital security by design |url=https://www.ukri.org/what-we-do/browse-our-areas-of-investment-and-support/digital-security-by-design/ |access-date=2025-01-18 |publisher=UK Research and Innovation}}</ref> to address adoption barriers for CHERI. The programme allocated £70M, matched by £100M of industrial investment, to build the CHERI software ecosystem.<ref name="dsbd" />

This initiative funded Arm’s Morello chip, a ''superset architecture'' designed to evaluate experimental CHERI features for potential production use based on [[AArch64]]. The Morello board was designed to run CheriBSD, as well as custom versions of Android and Linux. At the same time, the Cornucopia<ref>{{cite conference |author1=Nathaniel Wesley Filardo |author2=Brett F. Gutstein |author3=Jonathan Woodruff |author4=Sam Ainsworth |author5=Lucian Paul-Trifu |author6=Brooks Davis |author7=Hongyan Xia |author8=Edward Tomasz Napierala |author9=Alexander Richardson |author10=John Baldwin |author11=David Chisnall |author12=Jessica Clarke |author13=Khilan Gudka |author14=Alexandre Joannou |author15=A. Theodore Markettos |author16=Alfredo Mazzinghi |author17=Robert M. Norton |author18=Michael Roe |author19=Peter Sewell |author20=Stacey Son |author21=Timothy M. Jones |author22=Simon W. Moore |author23=Peter G. Neumann |author24=Robert N. M. Watson |title=Cornucopia: Temporal Safety for CHERI Heaps |conferencebook-title=Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2020) locaiton|___location=San Jose, CA, USA |date=May 18-20, 2020 |url=https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/pdfs/2020oakland-cornucopia.pdf |doi=10.1109/SP40000.2020.00098}}</ref> project demonstrated that CHERI could enforce both spatial and temporal memory safety, offering deterministic protection against heap object temporal aliasing (roughly, "use-after-free"). The follow-up project, Cornucopia Reloaded,<ref name="cornucopiareloaded" /> showcased efficient temporal safety using page-table features in Morello, in particular, near-negligible pause times for the application making use of revocation.

In 2023 Microsoft introduced CHERIoT<ref name="cheriot" />, a [[RISC-V]] CHERI adaptation optimised for small embedded devices. CHERIoT incorporated ideas from Cornucopia and memory colouring techniques such as SPARC ADI and Arm MTE to enhance security. As part of the UKRI-funded Sunburst project, lowRISC launched the Sonata platform to advance RISC-V-based CHERI development and support standardisation efforts. Both the CHERI RISC-V research work and CHERIoT fed into the standardisation process for an official CHERI family of RISC-V extensions.<ref name=":2">{{cite web |title=CHERI Ratification Plan |url=https://lf-riscv.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CTXX/pages/47022116/CHERI+Ratification+Plan |access-date=10 January 2025}}</ref> Codasip announced that they had RISC-V IP cores with CHERI extensions available to license.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/codasip-delivers-first-commercial-cheri-processor-using-risc-v/| publisher=eeNews | access-date=20 January 2025| title= Codasip delivers first commercial CHERI processor using RISC-V| date=2 November 2023 }}</ref>