CHERI is deterministic.

That’s strictly better, in theory.

(Not sure it’s practically better. You could make an argument that it’s not.)

VogonPoetry 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is on the verge of pedantry - CHERI determinism isn't strictly true, garbage collecting abandoned descriptors is currently done asynchronously. Malicious code could attempt to reuse an abandoned descriptor before it is "disappeared". I think it might be possible to construct a synthetic situation where two threads operating with perhaps different privilege in the same address space (something CHERI can support!) have an IPC channel might be affected by the timing.

There is a section in the technical reports that talks about garbage collection.

I don't think CHERI is currently being used with different privileged threads in the same address space.

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Findecanor 3 days ago | parent [-]

I suspect that the parent poster was referring to MTE's memory protection being probabilistic. There are only 16 tag values for an attacker to guess. You can combine MTE and PAC, but PAC is also only probabilistic.

With CHERI, there is nothing to guess. You either have a capability or you don't.

	▲	labcomputer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, but the problem with CHERI is that you may (probabilistically) continue to have that capability even after you shouldn't. That's the problem. That's because the capability (tagged pointer) itself is what gives you the right to access memory. So you have to find all the capabilities pointing to a segment of memory and invalidate them. Remember, capabilities are meant to be copied. Early work on CHERI (CHERIvoke) proposed a stop-the-world barrier to revoke capabilities by doing a full scan of the program's memory (ouch!) to find and invalidate any stale capabilities. Because that is so expensive, the scan is only performed after a certain threshold amount of memory has been freed. That threshold introduces a security / battery life trade-off. That was followed by "Cornucopia", which proposed a concurrent in-kernel scan (with some per-page flags to reduce the number of pages scanned) followed by a shorter stop-the-world. In 2024 (just last year), "Reloaded" was proposed, which add still more MMU hardware to nearly eliminate pauses, at the cost of 10% more memory traffic. Unfortunately, the time between free and revocation introduces a short-but-not-zero window for UAF bugs/attacks. This time gap is even explicitly acknowledged in the Reloaded paper! Moreover, the Reloaded revocation algo requires blocking all threads of an application to ensure no dead capabilities are hidden in registers. In contrast, with MTE, you just change the memory's tag on free, which immediately causes all formerly-valid pointers to the memory granule to become invalid. That's why you would want both: They're complementary. * MTE gives truly instantaneous invalidation with zero battery impact, but only probabilistic spatial protections from attackers. * CHERI gives deterministic spatial protection with eventually-consistent temporal invalidation semantics.

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bri3d 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

FWIW (I am a nobody compared to you; I didn't make FIL-C :) ) - I think that MIE/MTE are practically superior to CHERI.

I also think this argument is compelling because one exists in millions of consumer drives, to-be-more (MTE -> MIE) and one does not.