Memory vulnerabilities remain one of the most pervasive threats to software security, accounting for nearly 70% of critical defects and primarily arising from improper dynamic memory management. Beyond its security implications, memory allocation plays a fundamental role in determining system performance. Although hardware-assisted security mechanisms — including Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), CHERI capabilities, and Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) — have advanced significantly, their adoption in real-world systems still demands extensive manual intervention and low-level programming, which increases development complexity and the likelihood of errors.
The M4Secure project addresses these challenges by developing an open-source framework that automatically generates customizable memory management libraries tailored to formal security and performance requirements. It leverages automated code synthesis to reduce manual development effort, applies formal verification techniques such as model checking to guarantee correctness and predictability, and supports multiple hardware security architectures. By bridging the gap between hardware capabilities and software implementation, M4Secure aims to accelerate the development of secure, high-performance software systems and foster a paradigm shift from trusted construction to automatically verified software foundations.