In April 2019, I spent two hours presenting various aspects of the CHERI project from Cambridge University and SRI. The presentation was modular, and so there were several slide decks used:

• Introduction gave an overview of CHERI as viewed by a typical systems programmer concerned with kernels and runtime libraries.

• “Tags in Memory and Caches”: some slides were shown from the talk given for the CHERI ICCD 2017 paper, Efficient Tagged Memory. The full deck is available.

• Capabilities as Threats to Pipelines gave a very quick summary of section 8 of our paper, CHERI Concentrate: Practical Compressed Capabilities (2019). This section discusses how CHERI-specific funcitonal units fit into a standard MIPS CPU pipeline design and contrasts against an existing compressed pointer scheme called “Low-Fat”.

• A sneak-peek of the CheriABI: Enforcing Valid Pointer Provenance and Minimizing Pointer Privilege in the POSIX C Run-time Environment (2019) presentation; those slides are available.

• Sealing and Controlled Amplification gives a quick introduction to “sealed” capabilities in CHERI: bearer tokens that grant no architectural privilege until unsealed by authorized software.

• Temporal Safety and Capability Revocation gave a preview of some work we are hoping to publish at the end of the summer. I ask that you not steal our thunder.

• Why is CHERI not the Intel iAPX 432 was just a brief contrast between CHERI and a prior capability hardware architecture.

• Projects seeking students is a snapshot of some more or less “shovel-ready”, as they say, masters-thesis-sized projects.

The decks here have had some minor errata corrected relative to the presentation versions. Release disclaimers have been added, specifically

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. This research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-10-C-0237. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article/presentation are those of the author(s)/presenter(s) and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

For as long as CMU cares to keep the recording online, a video of the recording is available.