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I am incredibly happy that Apple has added MTE support to the latest iPhones and perhaps the M5 chips as well (?). If that’s the case I don’t think any other pe

I am incredibly happy that Apple has added MTE support to the latest iPhones and perhaps the M5 chips as well (?). If that’s the case I don’t think any other personal computers have anything close to Apple machines in terms of memory safety and related topics (Secure Enclave etc). Hope other vendors will ship MTE in their laptop and desktop chips soon enough. While I’m very positive about x86_64 adding support for this (ChkTag), it’ll definitely take a while… In my opinion a worthwhile enough reason to upgrade but feels like a waste given my current devices work great.

abalone 11mo ago
Not only does M5 have MTE, it has an "enhanced" version of it. "We conducted a deep evaluation and research process to determine whether MTE, as designed, would meet our goals for hardware-assisted memory safety. Our analysis found that, when employed as a real-time defensive measure, the original Arm MTE release exhibited weaknesses that were unacceptable to us, and we worked with Arm to address these shortcomings in the new Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022."[1] The enhancements add:[2] * Canonical tag checking * Reporting of all non-address bits on a fault * Store-only Tag checking * Memory tagging with Address tagging disabled [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement... [2] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/109697/0100/Feature-descriptions/The-Armv8-9-architecture-extension?lang=en#md454-the-armv89-architecture-extension__FEAT_MTE4 https://developer.arm.com/documentation/109697/0100/Feature-...
- commandersaki 11mo ago
  Do you know if macos has the changes needed to make use of MIE with M5? I assume that it has with iPadOS.
- summa_tech 11mo ago
  It's MTE4. The "enhancements" mostly make it easier for Apple developers to hack XNU into continuing to operate with MTE.
  - astrange 11mo ago
    It's more like MTE was originally intended as a debugging tool (like ASan), and MTE4 makes it work as a security hardening measure.
- contact9879 11mo ago
  do you have a citation for M5 having MTE?
  - astrange 11mo ago
    It does.
  - abalone 11mo ago
    I did primary research. I just bought an M5 Mac and confirmed by doing: $ sysctl -a | grep MTE4 hw.optional.arm.FEAT_MTE4: 1
    - PicardsFlute 11mo ago
      Thank you for posting that. I was pretty sure the M5 was going to ship with MTE, but the last time I checked the documents, they still hadn't updated them (nor any mention of M5 having Apple10 in the metal feature tables). Some big features there that makes me want to upgrade!
musicale 11mo ago
Compiler/runtime support via clang and llvm should help I hope. I'd like to get to the point where web browsers (for example) always run with memory-safe compilation and runtime features on every platform. OS kernels would be nice as well. It will be nice to see more OSes ship with memory safety on by default for everything. Maybe OpenBSD is next?
- throwawaymaths 11mo ago
  sel4 ships with memory safety on by default.
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, Solaris SPARC and Linux on SPARC since 2015.
accelbred 11mo ago
Pixels with GrapheneOS also use MTE for security hardening

abalone 11mo ago

Not only does M5 have MTE, it has an "enhanced" version of it. "We conducted a deep evaluation and research process to determine whether MTE, as designed, would meet our goals for hardware-assisted memory safety. Our analysis found that, when employed as a real-time defensive measure, the original Arm MTE release exhibited weaknesses that were unacceptable to us, and we worked with Arm to address these shortcomings in the new Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022."[1] The enhancements add:[2] * Canonical tag checking * Reporting of all non-address bits on a fault * Store-only Tag checking * Memory tagging with Address tagging disabled [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement... [2] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/109697/0100/Feature-descriptions/The-Armv8-9-architecture-extension?lang=en#md454-the-armv89-architecture-extension__FEAT_MTE4 https://developer.arm.com/documentation/109697/0100/Feature-...

commandersaki 11mo ago
Do you know if macos has the changes needed to make use of MIE with M5? I assume that it has with iPadOS.
summa_tech 11mo ago
It's MTE4. The "enhancements" mostly make it easier for Apple developers to hack XNU into continuing to operate with MTE.
- astrange 11mo ago
  It's more like MTE was originally intended as a debugging tool (like ASan), and MTE4 makes it work as a security hardening measure.
contact9879 11mo ago
do you have a citation for M5 having MTE?
- astrange 11mo ago
  It does.
- abalone 11mo ago
  I did primary research. I just bought an M5 Mac and confirmed by doing: $ sysctl -a | grep MTE4 hw.optional.arm.FEAT_MTE4: 1
  - PicardsFlute 11mo ago
    Thank you for posting that. I was pretty sure the M5 was going to ship with MTE, but the last time I checked the documents, they still hadn't updated them (nor any mention of M5 having Apple10 in the metal feature tables). Some big features there that makes me want to upgrade!

musicale 11mo ago

Compiler/runtime support via clang and llvm should help I hope. I'd like to get to the point where web browsers (for example) always run with memory-safe compilation and runtime features on every platform. OS kernels would be nice as well. It will be nice to see more OSes ship with memory safety on by default for everything. Maybe OpenBSD is next?

throwawaymaths 11mo ago
sel4 ships with memory safety on by default.
pjmlp 11mo ago
As mentioned elsewhere, Solaris SPARC and Linux on SPARC since 2015.

accelbred 11mo ago

Pixels with GrapheneOS also use MTE for security hardening