CHERI-D Reincarnate: efficient multicore CHERI temporal memory safety through allocation reincarnation (draft version)
We propose CHERI-D Reincarnate (Reinc), an architectural extension to CHERI for scalable and efficient temporal memory safety. Prior work CHERI-D has a finite-width generation ID stored at a fixed location, requiring an object to be quarantined when its ID is exhausted. Reinc further provides use-after-free mitigation while permitting immediate freed memory reuse for objects through allocation reincarnation: rather than quarantining an allocation slot upon ID exhaustion, Reinc dynamically assigns a new ID to that slot when its current ID is exhausted. Exhausted IDs are quarantined and later reclaimed, while the underlying memory remains available for immediate reuse. By quarantining IDs rather than memory, Reinc enables continuous reuse of memory in the common case, substantially reducing both memory-sweep frequency and quarantine memory overhead. Reinc further introduces coherent ID caching while retaining a fully decentralized ID organization. Temporal metadata remains colocated with the memory it protects, preserving locality while avoiding centralized metadata structures. To support multicore execution, Reinc connects physical coherence events to the virtually addressed ObjID buffer using lightweight reverse-map and filter-based mechanisms. We implement Reinc as a hardware-software co-design spanning CHERI-Toooba (superscalar FPGA softcore), QEMU, LLVM/Clang and CheriBSD. Across our evaluated workloads, Reinc substantially reduces memory-sweep frequency and memory quarantine while incurring low performance and hardware overhead.