Background reading

To perform these exercises most effectively, we recommend first building a working knowledge of CHERI. The most critical references will be the Introduction to CHERI and CHERI C/C++ Programming Guide, but there is a broad variety of other reference material available regarding CHERI:

• An Introduction to CHERI - An overview of the CHERI architecture, security model, and programming models.
• CHERI C/C++ Programming Guide - This use of CHERI capabilities to represent C/C++ pointers requires modest changes to the way C and C++ are used. This document describes those changes.
• CheriABI: Enforcing Valid Pointer Provenance and Minimizing Pointer Privilege in the POSIX C Run-time Environment - This paper describes the CheriABI pure-capability process environment these exercises are expected to use. An extended technical report is also available.
• Cornucopia: Temporal Safety for CHERI Heaps - The temporal-safety exercises require the use of Cornucopia's quarantine and revocation infrastructure.
• Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions: CHERI Instruction-Set Architecture (Version 8) - Instruction reference and design discussion.
• Complete spatial safety for C and C++ using CHERI capabilities - This PhD dissertation provides an extensive overview of the CHERI-MIPS linking model (also relevant to the current CHERI-RISC-V model), an implementation of opportunistic subobject bounds, and general C/C++ compatibility issues.