May 22, 2026 • Nathaniel Wesley Filardo C and C++ are low-level languages, nominally especially well suited for working with hardware and in performance-sensitive data processing applications, and yet, they lack convenient, portable mechani…
Mar 23, 2026 • David Chisnall Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away In the last week or so, we’ve started landing patches in our compiler to remove the auicgp instruction.…
Most CHERIoT work to date has been done on software or FPGA simulations. We have several such implementations: The executable model built from our formal ISA specification, the MPact simulator from Google, Microsoft’s CHERIoT SAFE FPGA targ…
Feb 4, 2026 • David Chisnall Each year, MITRE publishes a list of the top 25 most dangerous software weaknesses. The 2025 list is interesting reading. Let’s see how CHERIoT fares against them. The top three (CWEs 79, 89, and 352) are not ty…
Dec 12, 2025 • David Chisnall When you tell everyone you’re building a secure platform, the first thing that they ask about is encryption. And, in 2025, the hot topic in encryption is algorithms that are safe from hypothetical quantum compu…
Nov 26, 2025 • David Chisnall In the last month or so (partly as a result of going to SOSP), I’ve seen a lot of architecture diagrams for operating systems and one thing has struck me about all of them: they put the device drivers in the wr…
Nov 21, 2025 • David Chisnall The recent UKRI press release announcing £21M for CHERI projects includes two CHERIoT-focused activities. The tools programme, in particular, has funded SCI Semiconductor to bring Rust support for CHERIoT to pr…
Nov 19, 2025 • David Chisnall Recently, a few people have asked me ‘should we do CHERI or CHERIoT?’ I hadn’t previously written an answer to this because the question doesn’t make sense: it’s like asking ‘should we do MMUs or x86 page table…
Nov 6, 2025 • David Chisnall Sealing is one of the oldest parts of CHERI and one of the most powerful. When I joined the project in 2012 it was integral to the early prototype call-gate mechanism. You can find this version in our 2014 tech
Nov 3, 2025 • David Chisnall Today, we released the 1.0 version of the CHERIoT specification! For those reading about CHERIoT for the first time, it is a hardware-software co-design project that aims to produce secure microcontroller-class
Jul 4, 2025 • David Chisnall Back in October last year, I wrote a bit about why we wrote a new RTOS for CHERIoT. Reading that again, I realise that it had a lot of high-level concepts but missed out on some detail. This time, I wanted to ta…
May 16, 2025 • David Chisnall This week, we received an IEEE Security and Privacy Test of Time Award for the 2015 paper CHERI: A Hybrid Capability-System Architecture for Scalable Software Compartmentalization. This seemed like a good oppor…