ROLOAD-PMP: A RISC-V CHIP EXTENSION THAT LOCKS DOWN SENSITIVE POINTERS WITH UNDER 1.4% EXTRA HARDWARE COST

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

Attackers commonly hijack sensitive operations like control-flow transfers by corrupting the data pointers that feed into them, and existing defenses either only cover part of the attack surface or carry overheads too heavy for constrained systems like IoT devices, kernels, and bare-metal firmware. ROLoad-PMP tackles this with new RISC-V instructions that can only load data from read-only memory regions tagged with specific keys, guaranteeing the integrity of whatever a pointer points to even if the pointer itself gets corrupted.