Presenting TAGSHIELD at AsiaCCS 2026 was a particularly meaningful experience for me, as it was my first academic conference as a speaker.
TAGSHIELD addresses stack memory corruption in memory-unsafe C and C++ software by building on Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE). The main contribution of the paper is TAGShield, a runtime mitigation mechanism that enforces persistent and deterministic protection for stack spatial memory errors while preserving pointer tag integrity. It combines compile-time tagging with lightweight instrumentation to keep tags correct and to reduce the risk that pointer arithmetic or adversarial manipulation weakens the defense.
The results are encouraging: the evaluation shows that TAGShield can substantially improve protection with modest overhead, while remaining effective on representative workloads such as SPEC CPU2006 and nginx.
I would like to thank all the co-authors for their collaboration, and in particular Michele Grisafi, whose contribution was central to this work.
It was also a pleasure to attend the conference in India. And yes, the mango there is awesome.