Dear all,
We’ve received another request…
Message: Hi, My name is Po-An Chen, a PhD student at UC Irvine's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory, advised by Prof. Michael Franz. I'm writing on behalf of our lab to request a loan of a Morello board. Over the past two years we've built a working system that recompiles stripped x86-64 binaries directly into genuine pure-capability CHERI binaries, without source, targeting both CHERI-RISC-V and Arm Morello. The prototype runs end-to-end today and is already validated for correctness in QEMU-CHERI simulation, and we're now eagerly trying to move it onto real hardware. What's left is a performance question: how much runtime overhead our recovery approach costs, and how far we can close that gap against code natively compiled for CHERI. The simulator can't answer this. Emulated wall-clock time is dominated by the emulator's own interpretation cost and swings under host load, so cache behavior, memory-hierarchy effects, and actual capability-check latency in silicon are all invisible to it. A physical board is what lets us measure the thing we actually care about. We think this also lines up with the Alliance's own roadmap. The population we are targeting are already-compiled, general-purpose C/C++ software on x86 that predates CHERI and often can't be rebuilt with a modern toolchain. x86 has dominated the server tier for decades, so bringing exactly that installed base of x86 software to CHERI-RISC-V and Morello sits right at the intersection of the trends. A little about us: Prof. Michael Franz is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine and director of the Secure Systems and Software Laboratory, with a long record in systems and software security spanning software diversification, secure just-in-time compilation, and binary analysis. Since we target both CHERI-RISC-V and Morello, if your team can also help with a CHERI-RISC-V board, or point us to the right group, we'd be very grateful. We'd welcome staying involved with the CHERI ecosystem beyond this project. Happy to answer any questions or share more detail, and thank you for considering our request. Thank you.
Please tell me what you think?
Thanks and best regards,
––
Mike Eftimakis – Founding director
CHERI Alliance
mike.eftimakis(a)cheri-alliance.org <mailto:mike.eftimakis@cheri-alliance.org>
Web: cheri-alliance.org <http://cheri-alliance.org/>
Dear all,
We have a request from Juniper Network for a Morello board to do some research on CHERI.
Are you happy for us to send one?
Thanks!
––
Mike Eftimakis – Founding director
CHERI Alliance
mike.eftimakis(a)cheri-alliance.org <mailto:mike.eftimakis@cheri-alliance.org>
Web: cheri-alliance.org <http://cheri-alliance.org/>
