Chrompartments' Hybrid Adapted V8

This repo contains our work adapting V8 with hybrid CHERI to enhance some of its security properties around memory.

The chromium version we work with is 121.0.6167.160 — it needs to be pinned so that the correct versions of dependencies can be installed.

Getting Started

There are some notes at the top of CMakeLists.txt, which include instructions you'll need to act on before building V8. You should follow those before bootstrapping the V8 source! The steps to get set up and build a helloworld binary are…:

# === follow prerequisite steps from CMakeLists.txt ===
./grab_source.sh    # Sets up chromium source in this repo
cmake .             # Create makefiles
make                # Build v8. This takes a while, and there's a manual step!
make hello-world    # Compile a helloworld binary at `out/hybrid/helloworld`

Planned approaches to introducing CHERI to V8

There are a couple of angles we're planning to take to introduce CHERI to V8, and make things more secure in the process:

• "CapabilityHandles", a version of DirectHandles which may replace the lookup tables used by V8's sandbox to reduce overhead while maintaining its existing security properties.
• Using hybrid CHERI compartmentalisation to sandbox the execution of generated code.
• Construction of a "sandbox stack" where untrusted code might execute.

These are discussed in more detail in a google doc, and relate to the V8 Sandbox team's notes on the possiblility of a hardware-supported sandbox.