Memory safety in C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead.
In this talk we will discuss three implementations of memory tagging. One is SPARC ADI, a full hardware implementation. Another is HWASAN, a partially hardware-assisted compiler-based tool for AArch64. Last but not least, ARM MTE, a
recently announced hardware extension for AArch64. We describe the basic idea, evaluate the three implementations, and explain how they improve memory safety. We'll pay extra attention to memory tagging as a security mitigation.
If you know what AddressSanitizer (ASAN) is, think of Memory Tagging as of "Low-overhead ASAN on steroids in hardware".
This talk is based on the paper "
Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety".
