Bringing memory safety to BSD with CHERI

Saturday 14:30 - 15:20

After a decade and a half of academic and industrial research, products using CHERI to provide hardware enforced, deterministic memory safety are making their way to market. CheriBSD, a research fork of FreeBSD, has been the primary vehicle for operating system research on supporting CHERI's memory safety and compartmentalization potential. We are now bringing the most complete and stable work from CheriBSD to FreeBSD with the goal shipping FreeBSD 16 with spatial and temporal memory safety. This talk will motivate this upstreaming, explain our plan, and cover progress to date. We hope to update the FreeBSD community on our progress and encourage other BSDs to learn from our adoption of CHERI.