Abstract

This talk will walk through the process of testing pre-production MTE hardware from a researcher's perspective. The technical results of this work have already been published (https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/08/mte-as-implemented-part-1.html), so this talk will focus on the research process, the technical setbacks encountered during the testing, and the limits of how thoroughly we can test the behaviour of modern CPUs. We'll give a brief summary of the main results, and then finish with a deep-dive into some of the limitations of MTE when used for security purposes.