PoisonCap: Efficient Hierarchical Temporal Safety for CHERI

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13210v1
• Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 08:59:55 GMT
• Title: PoisonCap: Efficient Hierarchical Temporal Safety for CHERI
• Abstract summary: We present PoisonCap: scalable temporal safety with strict use-after-free protection and initialisation safety for CHERI systems.<n>PoisonCap can replace the Cornucopia shadow, and also automatically zeros memory on reallocation.<n>It incurs no fundamental overhead relative to a Cornucopia baseline that zeros before reallocation.
• Score: 33.8782607160969
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In this paper, we present PoisonCap: scalable temporal safety with strict use-after-free protection and initialisation safety for CHERI systems. Efficient memory safety is an increasing priority for programming languages, operating systems, and hardware designs, and CHERI is a leading hardware/software system that provides native spatial safety and a foundation for temporal memory safety. Cornucopia Reloaded, the current state-of-the-art CHERI temporal safety solution, provides use-after-reallocation safety instead of stronger use-after-free safety, and is not able to enforce initialisation safety. We show that a new 'poison' capability format can be used to enforce strict use-after-free and initialisation safety, and also to communicate memory state to the microarchitecture for efficient cache management of quarantined memory. We enable elegant delegation of memory poisoning privilege using capability bounds to allow nested allocators to enforce safety on their consumers without disturbing upstream allocators. PoisonCap can replace the Cornucopia shadow bitmap, and also automatically zeros memory on reallocation, or optionally traps on read-before-write to enforce initialisation safety. As a result, it incurs no fundamental overhead relative to a Cornucopia baseline that zeros before reallocation, strengthening CHERI temporal safety without performance overhead.

Related papers

• Safin-1: Safety from Within through Memory-Native State Evolution [51.221955257147414]
  Safin-1 is a family of foundation models realizing this principle through memory routing and state evolution.<n> Safin-1 is built on Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that maintains structured memory states.<n>We investigate this interface on downstream safety tasks through a Safety State, demonstrating effective state-based adaptation with substantial safety improvements.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-31T13:48:48Z)
• CHERI-D: Secure and efficient inline object ID for CHERI temporal memory safety [33.8782607160969]
  CHERI-D is an architectural extension to CHERI that supports efficient temporal memory safety.<n>CHERI-D significantly reduces the revocation overhead of Cornucopia Reloaded.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-17T13:24:23Z)
• PICASSO: Scaling CHERI Use-After-Free Protection to Millions of Allocations using Colored Capabilities [8.29875974569966]
  We introduce colored capabilities that add a controlled form of indirection to CHERI's capability model.<n> Colored capabilities significantly reduce the frequency of capability revocation sweeps while improving security.<n>Our evaluation shows effective mitigation of use-after-free and double-free bugs across all heap-based temporal memory-safety vulnerabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-09T19:22:51Z)
• PoSafeNet: Safe Learning with Poset-Structured Neural Nets [49.854863600271614]
  existing approaches often enforce multiple safety constraints uniformly or via fixed priority orders, leading to infeasibility and brittle behavior.<n>We formalize this setting as poset-structured safety, modeling safety constraints as a partially ordered set and treating safety composition as a structural property of the policy class.<n>Building on this formulation, we propose PoSafeNet, a differentiable neural safety layer that enforces safety via sequential closed-form projection.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-29T22:03:32Z)
• SafeRedir: Prompt Embedding Redirection for Robust Unlearning in Image Generation Models [67.84174763413178]
  We introduce SafeRedir, a lightweight inference-time framework for robust unlearning via prompt embedding redirection.<n>We show that SafeRedir achieves effective unlearning capability, high semantic and perceptual preservation, robust image quality, and enhanced resistance to adversarial attacks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-13T15:01:38Z)
• Q-realign: Piggybacking Realignment on Quantization for Safe and Efficient LLM Deployment [55.14890249389052]
  Existing defenses either embed safety recovery into fine-tuning or rely on fine-tuning-derived priors for post-hoc correction.<n>We propose textttQ-realign, a post-hoc defense method based on post-training quantization.<n>Our work provides a practical, turnkey solution for safety-aware deployment.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-13T00:07:24Z)
• RoboSafe: Safeguarding Embodied Agents via Executable Safety Logic [56.38397499463889]
  Embodied agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly capable of executing complex real-world tasks.<n>However, they remain vulnerable to hazardous instructions that may trigger unsafe behaviors.<n>We propose RoboSafe, a runtime safeguard for embodied agents through executable predicate-based safety logic.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-24T15:01:26Z)
• SafeFFI: Efficient Sanitization at the Boundary Between Safe and Unsafe Code in Rust and Mixed-Language Applications [5.578413517654703]
  Unsafe Rust code is necessary for interoperability with C/C++ libraries and implementing low-level data structures.<n>Sanitizers can catch such memory errors at runtime, but introduce many unnecessary checks even for memory accesses guaranteed safe by the Rust type system.<n>We introduce SafeFFI, a system for optimizing memory safety instrumentation in Rust binaries.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-23T16:02:45Z)
• UpSafe$^\circ$C: Upcycling for Controllable Safety in Large Language Models [67.91151588917396]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks.<n>We propose UpSafe$circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling.<n>Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-02T16:43:33Z)
• LiteRSan: Lightweight Memory Safety Via Rust-specific Program Analysis and Selective Instrumentation [19.377860990540444]
  Rust is a memory-safe language, and its strong safety guarantees have been attracting widespread adoption.<n>A widely adopted approach for detecting memory safety bugs in Rust is Address Sanitizer (ASan)<n>We present LiteRSan, a novel memory safety sanitizer that addresses the limitations of prior approaches.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-19T20:09:20Z)
• Mon CHÉRI: Mitigating Uninitialized Memory Access with Conditional Capabilities [3.5465353320225113]
  Up to 10% of memory-safety vulnerabilities in languages like C and C++ stem from und variables.<n>This work addresses the prevalence and lack of adequate software mitigations for und memory issues.<n>We extend the CHERI capability model to include "conditional capabilities", enabling memory-access policies based on prior operations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-11T16:51:36Z)
• CryptSan: Leveraging ARM Pointer Authentication for Memory Safety in C/C++ [0.9208007322096532]
  CryptSan is a memory safety approach based on ARM Pointer Authentication. We present a full LLVM-based prototype implementation, running on an M1 MacBook Pro. This, together with its interoperability with uninstrumented libraries and cryptographic protection against attacks on metadata, makes CryptSan a viable solution for retrofitting memory safety to C/C++ programs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-02-17T14:04:01Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.