Technical reports

Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI): Notes on the Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

Robert N. M. Watson, Jonathan Woodruff, Michael Roe, Simon W. Moore, Peter G. Neumann

February 2018, 16 pages

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contracts FA8750-10-C-0237 (“CTSRD”) and FA8750-11-C-0249 (“MRC2”), as part of the DARPA CRASH and MRC research programs. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. Additional support was received from St John’s College Cambridge, the Google SOAAP Focused Research Award, the RCUK’s Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub Grant (EP/G065802/1), the EPSRC REMS Programme Grant (EP/K008528/1), the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (EP/K503757/1), the Isaac Newton Trust, the UK Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), Thales E-Security, ARM Ltd, and HP Enterprise.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-916

Abstract

In this report, we consider the potential impact of recently announced Meltdown and Spectre microarchitectural side-channel attacks arising out of superscalar (out-of-order) execution on Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) computer architecture. We observe that CHERI’s in-hardware permissions and bounds checking may be an effective form of mitigation for one variant of these attacks, in which speculated instructions can bypass software bounds checking. As with MMU-based techniques, CHERI remains vulnerable to side-channel leakage arising from speculative execution across compartment boundaries, leading us to propose a software-managed compartment ID to mitigate these vulnerabilities for other variants as well.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-916,
  author =	 {Watson, Robert N. M. and Woodruff, Jonathan and Roe,
          	  Michael and Moore, Simon W. and Neumann, Peter G.},
  title = 	 {{Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI):
         	   Notes on the Meltdown and Spectre Attacks}},
  year = 	 2018,
  month = 	 feb,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-916.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-916},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-916}
}