CppCon 2018: Kostya Serebryany “Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety”

Kostya Serebryany discusses hardware-assisted memory tagging implementations like ARM MTE and HWASAN to improve memory safety in C and C++.

CppCon.org — Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/CppCon/CppCon2018 — 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". — Kostya Serebryany, Google Software Engineer Konstantin (Kostya) Serebryany is a Software Engineer at Google. His team develops and deploys dynamic testing tools, such as AddressSanitizer and ThreadSanitizer. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Konstantin spent 4 years at Elbrus/MCST working for Sun compiler lab and then 3 years at Intel Compiler Lab. Konstantin holds a PhD from mesi.ru and a Master from msu.ru. — Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf --- Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com