Introduction to Project CHERIoT - Kunyan Liu, Microsoft

Introduction to Project CHERIoT - Kunyan Liu, Microsoft CHERIoT is a security solution for 32-bit embedded MCU systems, developed by a Microsoft team and other industrial/academic collaborators. It is derived from the CHERI concept oringally from Univ. of Cambridge and other industrial partners. Built around a proposed extension to the RV32 instruction set, it includes several main components: the ISA extension specification, a production-quality MCU core RTL reference design, a RTOS reference design, and the corresponding compiler/linker/debugger toolchain. By using unforgeable capabilities to control memory accesses, CHERIoT provides strong security guarantees including spatial memory safety, temporal memory safety, and fine-granularity compartmentalization between software components in a mutual distrust model. Our work has demonstrated that the security guarantee may be achieved with only moderate cost in terms of silicon area, code size, and runtime cost.