Strengthening the Shield: MTE in Heap Allocators
Introduction In 2018, with the release of ARMv8.5-A, a brand new chip security feature MTE (Memory Tagging Extensions) emerged. Five years later, in 2023, the first smartphone to support this feature was released — Google Pixel 8 — marking the official entry of MTE into the consumer market. Although this feature is not yet enabled by default, developers can turn it on themselves for testing. As a powerful defense against memory corruption, there has not yet been a comprehensive analysis of MTE’s defensive boundaries, capabilities, and its impact on performance on the internet....