CHERI Alliance

Driving a global industrial ecosystem to solve the biggest cybersecurity challenge: memory vulnerabilities

CHERI will revolutionise our fight against cyberattacks. It’s time to act and accelerate its adoption!

Why adopt CHERI?

By adding CHERI technology into a product, manufacturers protect their customers and their reputation.

Cybersecurity Ventures estimate that cyberattacks cost more than $10 trillion/year. This keeps increasing as the pressure goes up every year, and they anticipate that global spending on cybersecurity will exceed $1.75 trillion cumulatively over the five years from 2021 to 2025【951954835739816†L167-L170】.

Most attacks result from memory misuse and unexpected software defects, which can be mitigated by CHERI【951954835739816†L172-L174】. Vendors must increase the robustness of their products to solve the problem.

CHERI significantly improves system security by extending conventional hardware Instruction‑Set Architectures (ISAs) with new features to enable fine‑grained memory protection and highly scalable software compartmentalization【951954835739816†L176-L179】. Instead of repeatedly patching newly discovered problems, CHERI adopts a preventive approach, making buffer overflows and other attacks using memory misuse simply impossible【951954835739816†L176-L181】.

CHERI provides the security reassurance end customers and even the most sensitive applications require. Supported to date by DARPA, UKRI, Google, Microsoft and Arm, CHERI is a major asset in the fight against cybercrime【951954835739816†L183-L185】.

What is the CHERI Alliance?

CHERI Alliance is an industry initiative spearheading the global adoption of the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) security technology across the computing industry【905723338405050†L159-L166】.

Building on over a decade of pioneering research by the University of Cambridge and SRI International, CHERI introduces a revolutionary architecture designed to enhance system security through fine‑grained memory protection and software compartmentalization【905723338405050†L165-L168】.

The Alliance is actively engaging with industry, academia, and the public sector to standardize and implement CHERI across a diverse range of computing platforms. Supported to date by DARPA, UKRI, EPSRC, ERC, Google, Microsoft and Arm, CHERI is a major asset in the fight against cybercrime【905723338405050†L170-L173】.