Department of Computer Science and Technology

CTSRD

CTSRD – Rethinking the hardware-software interface for security

PIs: Robert N. M. Watson (University of Cambridge), Simon W. Moore (University of Cambridge), Peter Sewell (University of Cambridge), Brooks Davis (SRI International) and Peter Neumann (SRI International)


CHERI tablet photo

September 2023: We have posted CHERI ISAv9, which replaces CHERI-MIPS with CHERI-RISC-V as our primary reference architecture, CHERI-MIPS is removed, merged register files are always used, tags are cleared in preference to exception throwing for non-monotonic capability modification, and DDC/PCC no longer relocate memory accesses by default. CHERI-RISC-V is substantially refined in preparation for standardisation. The CHERI-x86 sketch is now substantially more detailed.

January 2022: Arm has shipped its CHERI-enabled Morello prototype processor, SoC, and board! Read blog posts about this at Arm and Microsoft, and our own thoughts at Cambridge.

Learn about the CHERI architecture! Our technical report An Introduction to CHERI is a high-level summary of our work on CHERI architecture, microarchitecture, formal modeling, and software.

Clean Slate Trustworthy Secure Research and Development (CTSRD - pronounced "custard") is a joint research project between SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, supported by DARPA (part of the DARPA CRASH, MRC, and SSITH programmes), Google, and Arm. The project is revisiting the hardware-software security interface for general-purpose CPUs to fundamentally improve security; to this end, we are integrating a hybrid capability model and continuous hardware-assisted validation of security design principles with a commodity CPU ISA and open source operating systems. We are pursuing several new software/hardware features as part of this research:

There is a strong interest, throughout, in judiciously applying formal methodology and bringing formally grounded techniques to mainstream hardware and software development. This work has motivated the creation of the Bluespec extensible RISC implementation – an open-source platform for research into the hardware-software interface, with a BSD-licensed operating system and toolchain based on FreeBSD and Clang/LLVM. We are using open source, wherever possible, to transition new technologies into mainstream use.

CTSRD builds on long past experience at both institutions in security and systems research, including Multics, PSOS, the Newcastle DSS, separation kernels, the DARPA CHATS programme, PVS/SAL/YICES, LynuxWorks, the CAP computer, the MAC Framework, multi-threaded CPU design, Xen, Capsicum, and MirageOS.

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