Brooks Davis
Brooks Davis is a Principal Research Scientist at Capabilities Limited and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory). He leads development of CheriBSD, a fork of FreeBSD supporting the CHERI architectural security extensions. He has been a FreeBSD user since 1994, a FreeBSD committer since 2001, and has served 4 terms on the core team.
Brooks earned a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 1998. His computing interests include security, operating systems, networking, high performance computing, and, of course, finding ways to use FreeBSD in all these areas.
Session
After a decade and a half of academic and industrial research, products using CHERI to provide hardware enforced, deterministic memory safety are making their way to market. CheriBSD, a research fork of FreeBSD, has been the primary vehicle for operating system research on supporting CHERI's memory safety and compartmentalization potential. We are now bringing the most complete and stable work from CheriBSD to FreeBSD with the goal shipping FreeBSD 16 with spatial and temporal memory safety. This talk will motivate this upstreaming, explain our plan, and cover progress to date. We hope to update the FreeBSD community on our progress and encourage other BSDs to learn from our adoption of CHERI.