Safe Speculation for CHERI
The work
| Authors | Franz A. Fuchs; Jonathan Woodruff; Peter Rugg; Alexandre Joannou; Jessica Clarke; John Baldwin; Brooks Davis; Peter G. Neumann; Robert N. M. Watson; Simon W. Moore |
|---|---|
| Editors | |
| Type | inproceedings |
| Year | 2024 |
| Citekey | fuchs2024safe |
Where it appeared
| Published in | 2024 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD) |
|---|---|
| Pages | 364--372 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1109/iccd63220.2024.00063 |
|---|
Access
| Landing page | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/378437 |
|---|
Related
| Distinct from | bauereiss2022verified |
|---|---|
| Distinct from | fuchs2023architectural |
From bibtex.
Abstract
We present an architectural Capability Speculation Contract (CSC) for CHERI implementations, test for violations in the CHERI-Toooba microarchitecture, and develop and evaluate a conforming implementation. The CHERI capability instruction-set extension promises proven architectural guarantees for memory safety and pointer provenance. However, superscalar and out-of-order CHERI implementations will need to contend with microarchitectural transient-execution side-channel attacks. To ensure the safety of all CHERI implementations, we articulate CSC: a universal architectural speculation contract for the CHERI architecture that maintains key capability invariants in speculation. We then develop tests against sub-classes of CSC, and discover violations in CHERI-Toooba that lead to a new class of transient-execution attacks, Meltdown-CF (Capability Forgery) for which we develop a user-mode exploit that allows reads of secret data. We then develop strategies to fully enforce CSC in CHERI-Toooba. We find that simplistic, strong enforcement in-curs a low performance overhead of only 3.43% in SPECint2006 benchmarks, with promise for more optimal designs in the future. Our architectural recommendations to mitigate Meltdown-CF have been accepted by the upstream CHERI architecture and are included in current CHERI-RISC-V drafts for ratification.
A copy is held
pdf, 320.9 kB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.
How it got here
| How it got here | agent via bibtex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-09-18 08:49 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-09-18 10:03 UTC |
Cite it as
@inproceedings{fuchs2024safe,
title = {Safe Speculation for CHERI},
author = {Franz A. Fuchs and Jonathan Woodruff and Peter Rugg and Alexandre Joannou and Jessica Clarke and John Baldwin and Brooks Davis and Peter G. Neumann and Robert N. M. Watson and Simon W. Moore},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {2024 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)},
pages = {364--372},
doi = {10.1109/iccd63220.2024.00063},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/fuchs2024safe/ and will keep doing so.