Security News > 2022 > January > Arm rages against the insecure chip machine with new Morello architecture

Arm has made available for testing prototypes of its Morello architecture, aimed at bringing features into the design of CPUs that provide greater robustness and make them resistant to certain attack vectors.

The Morello programme involves Arm collaborating with the University of Cambridge and others in tech to develop a processor architecture that is intended to be fundamentally more secure.

Morello prototype boards are now being released for testing by developers and security specialists, based on a prototype system-on-chip that Arm has built.

Arm said that the limited-edition evaluation boards are based on the Morello prototype architecture embedded into an Armv8.

Security capabilities in the Morello architecture centre on what Arm calls Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions, or CHERI. These appear to deliver changes to the way that CPU pointers operate, limiting the address ranges they can use to access memory locations, as well as placing restrictions on how those pointers can be used.

Arm claims there has never been a silicon implementation of this kind of hardware capability in a high-performance CPU, and so the Morello prototype board makes it possible for researchers to evaluate and test the security benefits of this kind of architecture in real-world scenarios.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/01/21/arm_morello_testing/