Mountain View: Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety

Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead.

In this talk we will describe two existing implementations of memory tagging. One is SPARC ADI, a full hardware implementation. The other is HWASAN, a partially hardware-assisted compiler-based tool for AArch64. We describe the basic idea, evaluate the two implementations, and explain how they improve memory safety. We'll pay extra attention to memory tagging as a security mitigation.

This talk is based on the paper Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.09517.pdf).

Konstantin (Kostya) Serebryany is a Software Engineer at Google. His team develops and deploys dynamic testing tools such as AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, and libFuzzer. Prior to joining Google in 2007, Konstantin spent 4 years at Elbrus/MCST working for Sun compiler lab and then 3 years at Intel Compiler Lab. He holds a PhD from mesi.ru and an MS from msu.ru.