Crypto-enforced capabilities for isolation

One or more non-transitory computer-readable storage media comprising a plurality of instructions that, in response to being executed by a first hardware processor of a first computing device, cause the first computing device to provide a compiler to compile a computer program, that includes:

• to parse and analyze source code of the computer program that generates pointers or de-references pointers;
• and
• to generate executable instructions for the source code of the computer program including as part of the generation, insertion of additional encryption or decryption executable instructions into the executable instructions for the source code of the computer program being generated, based at least in part on a result of the analysis, wherein the additional encryption or decryption executable instructions being inserted are arranged to restrict memory access operations against a plurality of memory locations of a memory of a second hardware processor of a second computing device used to execute the generated instructions of the source code of the computer program and the additional encryption and decryption instructions, the second computing device having been provided with the generated executable instructions of the source code of the computer program and the additional encryption or decryption executable instructions;
• wherein when the generated executable instructions of the source code of the computer program and the additional encryption or decryption executable instructions are executed by the second hardware processor, an output of each executed encryption instruction comprises a pointer that is at least partially encrypted, and the at least partially encrypted pointer is inputted into one of the decryption instructions, which on execution, recovers the pointer;
• and
• wherein each of the partially encrypted pointers comprises three fields:
• a permanent field, an object size field, and a pointer field, the permanent field being used to indicate whether the particular partially encrypted pointer will not expire or will only be valid for a single pre-defined time interval, the object size field specifying a size of one of a plurality of objects in the memory that the encrypted pointer grants access to, and the pointer field specifying an address in the memory for the one object.

A method of authenticating access to a memory region shared by one or more applications running on a computing device, comprising:

• receiving a first request from a function running in a protection domain (PD) of a runtime environment to allocate an object in a memory location of a shared memory region, and to generate a token for subsequent use to access the object;
• assigning a key to the PD, and generating an encrypted version of a pointer to the memory location of the object as the token, using an identifier of the PD (PDID) and the key;
• receiving, subsequently, a second request from a function running in the PD to use the token;
• and
• decrypting the token to recover the pointer to the memory location of the object, and passing the pointer to the function.