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Phoenix666 writes:

Oracle insists it really is going to sell computers powered by Sparc M7 processors – the same chips it started talking about in 2014.

On Monday, Big Red breathlessly unveiled hardware powered by the beefy microprocessor, and on Tuesday, its supremo Larry Ellison lauded the 64-bit CPU's security defenses.

One of these defenses certainly caught our eye: the ability to tag regions of memory so software hijacked by hackers cannot read or write data it isn't supposed to. This should, we're told, render vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed useless to attackers – more on that in a moment.

[...] The M7 has a defense mechanism called Silicon Secured Memory (SSM) which seems incredibly similar to Oracle's Application Data Integrity (ADI) technology.

ADI works like this: when an application requests some new memory to use via malloc(), the operating system tags the block of memory with a version number, and gives the app a pointer to that memory. The pointer also contains the version number, which is stashed in the top four bits. (A 64-bit pointer doesn't use all 64 bits: the most significant bits are usually all 1s or 0s, and can be used to store metadata.)

Whenever a pointer is used to access a block of memory, the pointer's version number must match the memory block's version number, or an exception will be triggered. The version numbers are checked in real-time by the processor with a tiny overhead – an extra one percent of execution time, according to Oracle's benchmarks.

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