VeriCHERI: Exhaustive Formal Security Verification of CHERI at the RTL
Anna Lena Duque Antón, Johannes Müller, Philipp Schmitz, Tobias Jauch, Alex Wezel, Lucas Deutschmann, Mohammad Rahmani Fadiheh, Dominik Stoffel, Wolfgang Kunz · 2024
Protecting data in memory from attackers continues to be a concern in computing systems. CHERI is a promising approach to achieve such protection, by providing and enforcing fine-grained memory protection directly in the hardware. Creating trust for the entire system stack, however, requires a gap-free verification of CHERI's hardware-based protection mechanisms. Existing verification methods for CHERI target the abstract ISA model rather than the underlying hardware implementation. Fully ensuring the CHERI security guarantees for a concrete RTL implementation is a challenge in previous flows and demands high manual efforts.