Kunyan giving the CHERIoT talk

We (Yucong Tao and Kunyan Liu) went to the RISC-V Summit North America 2023 in Santa Clara last week.

Kunyan presented CHERIoT (slides) on Wednesday, November 8. It was well received with a full audience and afterwards there were quite a few interesting Q&A discussions.

Overall it was a very exciting conference and there was clearly momentum for CHERI and CHERIoT. Codasip presented their 64-bit CHERI solution and got good amount of attention, and we had a good discussion with Tariq and Carl on how we may collaborate on the 32-bit side.

Codasip poster with a shout-out to CHERIoT!

Our friends at lowRISC introduced their CHERIoT FPGA dev board (codenamed SunBurst). In addition, CHERIoT got mentioned as a leading candidate for security solutions by several other speakers in their presentations. Interestingly, some tool vendors are already starting to look into how to verify CHERI-based architectures.

It has been said the theme of this summit is “RISC-V is here”. In the same spirit, we would like to also say “CHERIoT is here”.

While it is true that there are many—even daunting—challenges to adopt a solution like CHERIoT, it has the potential to fundamentally change the security equation in the IoT world, and we firmly believe that we have the right combination of talent, determination and leadership within our team (and the community) to tackle the problem. The project has come a long way over the past few years. Now we have all pieces of the ecosystem coming together, and we are fully committed to making it a real product (and many more to follow!).