Intel and AMD standardise ChkTag to bring Memory Safety to x86

Summary

ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety Memory safety violations due to programming errors have long afflicted software. Industry and academia have been searching for solutions to this problem. As first noted in August 2025 posts by Intel and AMD x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (EAG) leaders [1, 2], Intel and AMD are working together, along with their ecosystem partners in the EAG, to address the need for memory safety. They are creating a unified specification for a universal x86 memory tagging instruction set architecture, code named ChkTag (pronounced “Check Tag”). This will help ensure that x86 continues to meet the evolving needs of the ecosystem.Two fundamental beliefs about the current computing landscape motivate the need for x86 memory tagging. The first is that memory safety violations are significant sources of insecurity and unreliability. Guidance from multiple governments state that “Memory safety vulnerabilities are the most prevalent type of disclosed software vulnerability” [3] and point to the potential for memory-safe languages as well as memory tagging to address those issues [4]. This is a general data security concern, including for AI data, which governments have urged companies to defend against [5]. The second motivation for x86 memory tagging is the need for hardware acceleration. It is clear from the performance of software-based schemes, such as address sanitizers, that hardware acceleration will be needed for enabling memory safety checking in production code.ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (use-after-free). ChkTag is designed to be suitable for hardening applications, operating system kernels, hypervisors for virtualization, and UEFI firmware. ChkTag places control in the software developers’ hands to balance their security needs with operational elements that often become prominent when deploying code. For example, ChkTag provides instruction-g...