On the 12th October, the Dynamic Devices team were invited along to attend and speak at the Digital Security By Design All Hands Event! This is related to our involvement in the Digital Catapault Morello CHERI technology access programme (TAP).

At the event, we were hugely enthused to speak with many other businesses, all taking part in the Digital Security by Design research project. We had the opportunity to attend multiple workshops and get a much closer look at how CHERI works.

It was a fantastic event to attend and it was great to put faces to the names we’ve seen on the CHERI-CPU slack channel. It gave us the opportunity to introduce ourselves as a contributing member to this project and to speak about our aim of bringing Embedded Linux using the Yocto Project to the CHERI architecture and Morello platform.

We hope to attend more Digital Security by Design events as the project further progresses.

To learn more about the Digital Security by Design all hands event visit here.

Our project plan is open for all to see online via our GitHub.

Introduction

We are proud to announce that we are taking part in the Digital Security by Design programme!

Digital Catapult is the UK authority on advanced digital technology. Along with other companies, we will be working with prototype cybersecurity technology which could massively affect the future of cybersecurity.

Dynamic Devices have been given access to ARM’s Morello SoC and development board which is an industrial demonstrator of a capabiility architecture (CHERI) developed by ARM and Cambridge University. Morello implements a CHERI-extended ARMv8-A processor, GPU, peripherals and memory subsystem. This board will play a vital role for our research into the CHERI architecture.

The vast majority of cyber attacks exploit conventional hardware and software memory vulnerabilities. To overcome this issue, University of Cambridge researchers with colleagues at SRI International developed CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a novel instruction set architecture that could stop two thirds of cyber attacks.

As part of the project, Arm designed and built a prototype system on a chip (SoC) and demonstrator board, the Arm Morello board, which was made available to UK businesses for industrial evaluation earlier in 2022. The DSbD Technology Access Programme, managed by Digital Catapult, allows companies to experiment with the Morello board.

– digicatapult.org.uk

In the picture, you can see the ARM Morello board which we will be working on for the next 6 months.

Aim for the DSbD Programme

In terms of what Dynamic Devices wants to accomplish with this programme, we hope to work with the existing Morello build support and integrate this to the greatest extent possible into the Yocto Embedded Linux build system resulting in an accrediated Yocto Compatible meta-cheri layer.

What we’ve done so far

So far, we have:

• Built Cheri-BSD for Morello and QEMU.
• Installed Cheri-BSD onto the Morello board.
• Tested purecap/capabilities on Cheri-BSD with example tests and also developed our own programs to test the secure architecture.
• Researched on Linux/Android for Morello
• Built Android for Morello
• Researched into Yocto support for Cheri

Conclusion

We would like to offer a massive thank you to Digital Catapult for enabling Dynamic Devices be a part of the Digital Security by Design programme. It is fantastic to be working alongside so many other innovative companies to further research these technologies which will undoubtedly shape the future of cybersecurity.

This programme is 6 months long and we will provide updates as we progress our research into CHERI & Morello.

See related information for the DSbD here on Twitter & LinkedIn.