ICSA Colloquium Talk - 13/01/2022

Title: Principled Defenses Against Speculative Execution Attacks, and Why We Need to Look Beyond Speculative Execution Anyway

Abstract: Speculative execution attacks -- e.g., Spectre, Meltdown -- have rattled the Computer Security industry for the past several years.  This talk will first present our recent paper (Speculative Privacy Tracking) that shows how hardware can reduce privacy leakage of a speculative execution to precisely that of a non-speculative execution, while maintaining most of the performance benefits of speculation.  Time permitting, the talk will then describe several microarchitectural privacy threats beyond (but just as damaging as) speculative execution, and more generally give a survey of exotic microarchitecture with interesting novel security implications.

Bio: 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 awards and other distinctions.  Among other projects at UIUC, he recently led a center funded by Intel on Processor Security.