First CHERIoT Silicon
摘要
SCI Semiconductor 发布了首款 CHERIoT 硅片实现 ICENI 芯片，基于 CHERIoT Ibex 核心，主频最高 250 MHz，具备空间内存安全、确定性释放后使用保护、可审计中断控制等特性，并支持细粒度隔离和微型可信计算基。该芯片可运行在软件模拟器或 FPGA 上的程序，便于移植到生产环境。作者为 SCI 联合创始人，文章同时预告了在 Embedded World 等展会的展示。
荐读理由
该内容展示了 CHERIoT 从仿真走向真实硅片的进展，验证了硬件内存安全方案的可行性，对关注系统安全的开发者有参考价值，但面向 AI 工程的具体迁移路径尚不明确，需进一步评估。
原文
First CHERIoT Silicon!
Most CHERIoT work to date has been done on software or FPGA simulations. We have several such implementations: The executable model built from our formal ISA specification, the MPact simulator from Google, Microsoft’s CHERIoT SAFE FPGA target for the Arty A7, and of course lowRISC’s beautiful Sonata FPGA board, which is designed to simulate CHERIoT systems. These were always intended to be developing and prototyping systems, so I’m delighted to announce that SCI Semiconductor has the first silicon CHERIoT implementation.
[ Conflict disclaimer: I am a co-founder of SCI Semiconductor. ]
The dev board pictured above contains one of the first batch of ICENI chips to come back from the fab. This is a complete CHERIoT system, with all of the core CHERI properties (spatial memory safety, no pointer injection, and so on) along with all of the CHERIoT extensions that provide deterministic use-after-free protection, auditable control over interrupt state, and everything that we need for an aggressively compartmentalised RTOS.
This chip uses the CHERIoT Ibex core, running at up to 250 MHz, and includes a few feature that accelerate temporal safety, improve interrupt determinism, and so on. These build on top of all of the benefits of any CHERIoT implementation: deterministic mitigation of memory safety bugs from simple buffer overflows up to use-after-free, fine-grained compartmentalisation, and a programming model co-designed with both the ISA and the software stack to provide a tiny TCB. Anything that works on CHERIoT SAFE or Sonata should be very easy to port to ICENI for production use. Anything that runs on the software simulators should just work.
We’ll be showing the chips at Embedded World (Stand 4A - 131) next week and at CHERI Blossoms a couple of weeks later. From tomorrow, one will also be on display in the CHERI 15th anniversary exhibit in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Aside: The Iceni tribe were one of the pre-Roman tribes in Britain and are famous for their chariots (though more due to this statue than historical fact). I am only partially to blame for the bad puns in the naming.
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