Memory safety bugs account for a large proportion of critical IT vulnerabilities. Recent advances in CPU design, including tagged memory and capabilities, enable better runtime support for preventing memory exploits like buffer overflows, use-after-frees, etc. In this presentation I will review the UK-based CHERI/Morello initiative and explain how we take advantage of hardware capabilities for improving a legacy garbage collector (BoehmGC) and an embedded Python interpreter (MicroPython). I will also discuss current research challenges in runtime cyber security.

Jeremy Singer is a reader in programming language implementation at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he has been working for the past 15 years. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include compilers, programming languages, managed runtimes, cyber security and computing history.