Alfredo Mazzinghi, Ripduman Sohan, and Robert N. M. Watson, University of Cambridge
We design and implement a framework for tracking pointer provenance, using our CHERI fat-pointer capability architecture to facilitate analysis of security implications of program pointer flows in both user and privileged code, with minimal instrumentation. CHERI enforces pointer provenance validity at the architectural level, in the presence of complex pointer arithmetic and type casting. CHERI present new opportunities for provenance research: we discuss use cases and highlight lessons and open questions from our work.
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author = {Alfredo Mazzinghi and Ripduman Sohan and Robert N. M. Watson},
title = {Pointer Provenance in a Capability Architecture},
booktitle = {10th USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP 2018)},
year = {2018},
address = {London},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/tapp2018/presentation/mazzinghi},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}
