CHERIvoke

Concept

CHERIvoke is a 2019 paper and technique that characterises pointer revocation using CHERI capabilities to provide temporal memory safety. It employs a sweeping revocation algorithm together with a shadow bitmap of freed capabilities, and is presented as a building block in the broader UCAM-CL-TR-984 technical report on CHERI RISC-V.

First seen 6/8/2026

Last seen 6/8/2026

Evidence 2 chunks

Wiki v1

WIKI

Overview

CHERIvoke is the short name for the paper "CHERIvoke: Characterising Pointer Revocation using CHERI Capabilities for Temporal Memory Safety", published at the 52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-52) in Columbus, 2019. The work investigates how CHERI's hardware capabilities can be used to revoke freed pointers and thereby enforce temporal memory safety.

Technique

READ FULL ARTICLE →

NEIGHBORHOOD

No graph connections found for this entity yet. It may appear in future ingestion runs.

explore full graph →

RELATIONSHIPS

3 connections

sweeping revocation uses → 100% 2e

CHERIvoke uses sweeping revocation to achieve temporal memory safety with CHERI capabilities.

UCAM-CL-TR-984 ← uses 100% 1e

The thesis contributes to CHERIvoke research including developing the sweeping algorithm and shadow-bitmap idea.

shadow bitmap uses → 100% 1e

CHERIvoke uses a shadow bitmap of freed capabilities as part of its revocation approach.

LINKED ENTITIES

3 links

UCAM-CL-TR-984 USES Extracted graph relationship

sweeping revocation USES Extracted graph relationship

shadow bitmap USES Extracted graph relationship

CITATIONS

6 sources

6 citations — click to expand

[1] CHERIvoke is the short name of the paper 'CHERIvoke: Characterising Pointer Revocation using CHERI Capabilities for Temporal Memory Safety', published at the 52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-52) in Columbus, 2019. UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf

[2] The author's contribution to the CHERIvoke paper is the development of the sweeping algorithm applied, including the idea to keep a shadow-bitmap of freed capabilities. UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf

[3] The CHERIvoke paper is available at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/pdfs/201910micro-cheri-temporal-safety.pdf. UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf

[4] UCAM-CL-TR-984 plans further work on revocation that follows up on CHERIVoke [138] and Cornucopia [132], focusing on further optimisation, particularly optimised sweeping hardware. UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf

[5] UCAM-CL-TR-984 Chapter 7 'Accelerating temporal safety' covers sweeping revocation (7.1.1), optimising sweeping revocation via virtual memory, as-user memory accesses, prefetching, and a dedicated sweeper (7.2), and finding tags in the Toooba memory subsystem (7.3). UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf

[6] UCAM-CL-TR-984 Chapter 7.5 discusses alternative capability semantics (linear and indirect capabilities) as a way to avoid or reduce the need for revocation sweeping. UCAM-CL-TR-984.pdf