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Gigachadtoday at 5:57 AM3 repliesview on HN

Thankfully we have already made good progress towards things like arm memory tagging and memory safe languages.

It’s a rocky period right now but the future will be much more secure after all the low hanging fruit are found.


Replies

jordandtoday at 7:45 AM

There's still no x86_64 processors on the market with MTE and it was only recently standardised between Intel and AMD. It's going to be 10+ years before memory tagging is widespread on desktop, and 5 years for Android/iOS devices.

Cthulhu_today at 6:10 AM

That's definitely an improvement, but it's just one aspect of cybersecurity. Logical errors allowing people to e.g. log into services and extract data are likely everywhere still.

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microtonaltoday at 6:18 AM

How many devices/operating systems even use memory tagging? iOS, macOS and GrapheneOS, I think that's it? And iOS/macOS only use it for the kernel, a subset of system processes, and I think applications can opt in to it.

Heck, Google may have even hampered MTE in Pixel 11 (since support has been disabled) and Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 only got basic support.

We are moving way to slowly adopting hardware mitigations and memory-safe languages.

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