3 ms·

Anything that hardware can do to improve the situation? How about pointer authentication or memory tagging? Do these measures also fall into the band-aid catego

• pjmlp 4y ago
  It can, but they are like trying to solve memory corruption issues with the ultimate weapon, because all other mitigation efforts from the last 50 years have failed.
• vitiral 4y ago
  Most probably yes. If it was an actual viable fix you can be almost guaranteed that it would have been implemented long ago. Engineers would love to have their cake and eat it too.
• anthomtb 4y ago
  If that were the case, wouldn't the recommendation have been to use modern hardware rather than memory safe languages?
• ylk 4y ago
  There is CHERI, which seems pretty cool: “CHERI extends conventional hardware Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) with new architectural features to enable fine-grained memory protection and highly scalable software compartmentalization. The CHERI memory-protection features allow historically memory-unsafe programming languages such as C and C++ to be adapted to provide strong, compatible, and efficient protection against many currently widely exploited vulnerabilities.” https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ I forgot the details but iirc it’s not too much work to recompile programs for the architecture. It was discussed on HN before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007474