thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Application & OT Security · Advanced

Memory Tagging Extension (MTE)

An ARM hardware feature that tags memory allocations and pointers so mismatched accesses, such as use-after-free or overflows, are detected.

Definition

MTE assigns small tags to memory granules and pointers; accessing memory with a non-matching tag faults, catching many memory-safety bugs at runtime with modest overhead. It is supported on recent Android devices and some ARM servers.

Example

A Pixel phone with MTE enabled crashes on a use-after-free instead of allowing exploitation.

Exam tip

Detects spatial and temporal memory errors in hardware.

Related terms