Paper author here, thanks for the interest :). I just wanted to elaborate on the overhead numbers you mentioned. I am not specifically familiar with the 35%+ n

Paper author here, thanks for the interest :). I just wanted to elaborate on the overhead numbers you mentioned. I am not specifically familiar with the 35%+ numbers, but you should take into account the cost of any defense on top of the cost of putting tags in pointers, because that makes all the difference. We found in our experiments on SPEC CPU2006 that, without static analysis for optimizations, the cost of pointer tagging itself (tagging + masking) is 22% geomean, which is almost entirely due to masking on loads/stores. This is with a 64-bit masking constant (0x80000000ffffffff) which is unique to our approach and is relatively inefficient on x86. With 32-bit masking (0xffffffff constant), which is more common, the number is about 14%. This only covers metadata management and is not useful on its own, so you need to implement some kind of defense on top of this which is usually costly. The hardware support used by HWAsan only removes masking overhead by having the (ARM) hardware ignore the upper byte of the pointer, which is a nice way to not having to pay for masking. By the way, source code for Delta Pointers is online since today! https://github.com/vusec/deltapointers https://github.com/vusec/deltapointers