The CHERI project at SRI International and the University of Cambridge are pleased to announce our second CHERI reference software-stack release. The release supports the CHERI-RISC-V and Arm Morello architectures. A complete set of development tools, including compiler, OS, debugger, and emulator are included in the release.

For this second release, the software has been packaged to be used in an easily accessible Docker image, hosted on Docker Hub. The focus of the release has been on CheriBSD, with the merging of pure capability kernels and Morello support to the development mainline. There are also many continued improvements to tooling, including updates to cheribuild (our unified build system), the CHERI Clang/LLVM compiler suite, the CHERI-extended GNU Debugger (gdb), and the QEMU full-system emulator (which now supports both the CHERI-RISC-V and Morello architectures).

The CHERI protection model provides architectural primitives to protect computer systems from widely-exploited security vulnerabilities. CHERI revises the hardware/software architectural interface with hardware support for capabilities that can be used for fine-grained memory protection and scalable software compartmentalization. Supported by DARPA (the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects agency) as well as UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) and its Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program, CHERI is the work of a large research team at the University of Cambridge, SRI International, Arm and many industrial and academic collaborators throughout the world.

The release along with full release notes are now available on line at https://cheri-dist.cl.cam.ac.uk/