This technical report describes a new extension to capability machines. Capability machines are a special type of processors that include better security primitives at the hardware level. In capability machines, every word has an associated tag bit that indicates whether the value it contains is a capability or a regular data value. Capabilities enable fine-grained control of the authority over memory that program components have. Conceptually, capabilities can be viewed as being an unforgeable token carrying authority over a resource. CHERI is a recently developed capability machine that aims to provide fine-grained memory protection, software compartmentalization and backwards compatibility. While our ideas are implemented on CHERI, they are not limited to it and should be applicable to other capability machines as well. In this technical report we propose a new type of capabilities, which represent the authority to access (read and write to) a block of memory but not view its initial contents. Our main goal is to use this new type of capability as part of a secure calling convention, but other applications may be possible too.

中文翻译：

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未初始化的能力

这份技术报告描述了能力机器的新扩展。能力机器是一种特殊类型的处理器，在硬件级别包含更好的安全原语。在能力机器中，每个字都有一个关联的标记位，指示它包含的值是能力还是常规数据值。功能可以对程序组件拥有的内存权限进行细粒度控制。从概念上讲，能力可以被视为一种不可伪造的令牌，承载着对资源的权威。CHERI 是最近开发的能力机器，旨在提供细粒度的内存保护、软件分区和向后兼容性。虽然我们的想法是在 CHERI 上实现的，但它们不仅限于 CHERI，也应该适用于其他能力机器。在这份技术报告中，我们提出了一种新型能力，它代表访问（读取和写入）内存块但不能查看其初始内容的权限。我们的主要目标是将这种新型功能用作安全调用约定的一部分，但其他应用程序也是可能的。