Not quite a piece of CHERI-cake: Are new digital security by design architectures usable?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the usability of CHERI, a security-by-design architecture, revealing that developers face challenges due to warning displays and insufficient documentation during software porting.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into developer experiences and usability issues associated with adopting CHERI's security architecture.

Findings

Developers struggle with CHERI's warning and error messages.

Lack of diverse documentation hampers software porting.

Usability challenges impact adoption of security-by-design architectures.

Abstract

A digital security-by-design computer architecture, like CHERI, lets you program without fear of buffer overflows or other memory safety errors, but CHERI also rewrites some of the assumptions about how C works and how fundamental types (such as pointers) are implemented in hardware. We conducted a usability study to examine how developers react to the changes required by CHERI when porting software to run on it. We find that developers struggle with CHERI's display of warnings and errors and a lack of diverse documentation.