Is CHERI a capability system?

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Ben Laurie

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Sep 27, 2025, 4:12:51 AM (yesterday) Sep 27
to friam, Cap Talk
Rather than mix this into the other thread about production systems I thought I'd start a new one.

CHERI is inspired by capability systems and we do call pointers in CHERI "capabilities" but whether CHERI is actually a capability system itself is debatable.

Certainly CHERI makes it very easy to build something that we would all agree (I think) definitely is a capability system. But that's not the same question, of course.

We should see actual silicon for CHERI (on RISC-V) this year, btw.

I am happy to answer questions about CHERI, btw. And I probably should note that I picked a bad moment to ask this question as I'm about to start travelling for a few weeks but I will pay some attention!

Ben Laurie

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Sep 27, 2025, 4:20:52 AM (yesterday) Sep 27
to friam, Cap Talk
BTW, this bounced from cap-talk, dunno who runs that but I can share the error if they want...

Mark S. Miller

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Sep 27, 2025, 5:00:54 PM (yesterday) Sep 27
to fr...@googlegroups.com, Cap Talk
Please share the error with me


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