MTE As Implemented, Part 2: Mitigation Case Studies

By Mark Brand, Project Zero

Background

In 2018, in the v8.5a version of the ARM architecture, ARM proposed a hardware implementation of tagged memory, referred to as MTE (Memory Tagging Extensions).

In Part 1 we discussed testing the technical (and implementation) limitations of MTE on the hardware that we've had access to. This post will now consider the implications of what we know on the effectiveness of MTE-based mitigations in several important products/contexts.

To summarize - there are two …

access architecture arm brand case case studies extensions hardware implementation mark memory mitigation project studies tagging technical testing version