Seminar | March 1 | 4-5 p.m. | 306 Soda Hall
Christopher Fletcher, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
When it comes to security, hardware is the new software. Starting several years ago, this shift was made plain when a litany of attacks, such as "Spectre/Meltdown" and "Rowhammer", shattered our confidence in processors as a root of trust. Making matters worse, modern processors are incredibly complex, and have (as it turns out) been designed without proper attention given to security for decades. As a result, its not clear the extent of the problem or where to start to fix it---forcing both attackers and defenders into an arms race whose endpoint is unclear.
This talk will describe my group's work to help address the processor security problem, covering both defense- and offense-oriented topics. On the defensive side, I will describe a line of work that efficiently mitigates speculative execution attacks (a.k.a. "Spectre/Meltdown") in a software-transparent way. As a technical highlight, I will describe how this work enables a framework for designing secure hardware predictors, and how this framework enables additional capabilities (such as granting the hardware the ability to deduce its own privacy leakage). On the offensive side, I will describe an ongoing investigation we have been performing to better understand the broader microarchitectural threat landscape. I will highlight several new vulnerability classes that we discovered in the course of this investigation, their impact, and their implications on future defenses.
Chris Fletcher is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has broad interests ranging from Computer Architecture to Security to High-Performance Computing (ranging from theory to practice). These and related works have been awarded with several paper distinctions, memberships and other awards. Among other projects at UIUC, he recently finished leading a center funded by Intel on Processor Security.
Jessica Rojas, jessicarojas@berkeley.edu, 510-664-4674