(T03) (CFI) CHERI can eliminate ~ 70% of current vulnerabilities - in hardware This is a free and open technology Leading high-tech companies start to adopt it, but acceleration is needed

The worldwide cost of cyberattacks now reaches an estimated $10 trillion per year. Memory safety issues continue to be the main source of cyber security problems and have consistently represented ~70% of vulnerabilities over the past 20 years.

Therefore, there is a strong and increasing interest in CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a technology that mitigates memory safety vulnerabilities by design. It provides security features at the hardware level that can be leveraged by the software to provide more robust security. It has been developed by University of Cambridge and other research labs, and after 15 years of improvement and tuning, it is now starting to get into products.

However, getting the industry to adopt a new security technology requiring new hardware, is not something that will happen fast enough, without a proactive and coordinated effort. The CHERI Alliance, a non-profit organisation created to accelerate the adoption of the technology, is here to coordinate the ecosystem.

This talk provides an overview of the CHERI technology: the benefits it provide, an overview, and the status of its adoption. It also introduces the CHERI Alliance: its objectives, its means and its roadmap, and shows why and how companies and governments can help in accelerating the technology adoption.

Cf: https://cheri-alliance.org