Chip designer Arm has released a prototype of its Morello development board for researchers at Google, Microsoft and industry to test its goal for a CPU design that wipes out a chunk of memory-related security flaws in code.

The Morello board is the product of a collaboration between Arm, Cambridge University, Microsoft and others based on the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture. Microsoft says the board and system on chip (SoC) is the first high-performance implementation of CHERI, which provides "fine-grained spatial memory safety at a hardware level". If it proves successful after testing with legacy software, it could pave the way for future CPU designs.

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CHERI architectural extensions are designed to mitigate memory safety vulnerabilities. CHERI augments pointers -the variables in computer code that reference where data is stored in memory -with limits as to how those references can be used, the address ranges that they can use to access, and which functionality they can use. "Once baked into silicon, they cannot be forged in software," Arm explained. CHERI was developed by the University of Cambridge and SRI International after it received funding from DARPA's Clean-slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) program.

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The Morello architecture is based on CHERI. Arm kicked off work on hardware for the Morello program in 2019 with backing from the UK government's Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).       

The Morello demonstrator board is a tweaked Arm Neoverse N1, a 2.5GHz quad-core server core CPU with support for Armv8.2a 64-bit architecture that has extra features to enable CHERI-based "compartmentalization" to counter exploits against memory-related security flaws. 

"For any research project, this phase is both exciting and critical. There has never been a silicon implementation of this hardware capability technology in a high-performance CPU," said Arm.

The Morello board is a significant advancement for CHERI, which has been in development for over a decade. Saar Amar, of Microsoft's Security Research and Defense team, notes the top existing implementation of CHERI topped was Toooba, which