Treffer: Morello MicroPython: A Python Interpreter for CHERI

Arm Morello is a prototype system that supports CHERI hardware capabilities for improving runtime security. As Morello becomes more widely available, there is a growing effort to port open source code projects to this novel platform. Although high-level applications generally need minimal code refactoring for CHERI compatibility, low-level systems code bases require significant modification to comply with the stringent memory safety constraints that are dynamically enforced by Morello. In this paper, we describe our work on porting the MicroPython interpreter to Morello with the CheriBSD OS. Our key contribution is to present a set of generic lessons for adapting managed runtime execution environments to CHERI, including (1) a characterization of necessary source code changes, (2) an evaluation of runtime performance of the interpreter on Morello, and (3) a demonstration of pragmatic memory safety bug detection. Although MicroPython is a lightweight interpreter, mostly written in C, we believe that the changes we have implemented and the lessons we have learned are more widely applicable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published description of meaningful experience for scripting language runtime engineering with CHERI and Morello.