MTE As Implemented, Part 3: The Kernel

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. In Part 2 we discussed the implications of this for mitigations built using MTE in various user-mode contexts. This post will now consider the implications of what we …

access architecture arm brand extensions hardware implementation kernel mark memory project tagging technical testing version