Please note: This seminar will be given online.
Mohammadkazem (Kazem) Taram, PhD candidate
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego
The tension between security and performance has become more painful in recent years. In the context of processor architecture, we are observing a large influx of new attacks that appear regularly, each exploiting a crucial performance optimization, threatening to unwind decades of architectural gains.
This talk will cover how my research attempts to defuse this tension. I first describe our Packet Chasing attack as an example to show how performance optimizations can have devastating security implications. Then, I present novel secure and fast architectures to mitigate vulnerabilities in two of the most crucial performance optimizations in modern processors: Speculative Execution and Simultaneous Multithreading. Finally, I discuss my future research directions.
Bio: Mohammadkazem (Kazem) Taram is a Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego. His research interests lie in the intersection of computer architecture and security. In particular, he is interested in microarchitectural vulnerabilities, secure high-performance microarchitectures, and architecture support for security and privacy. His offensive microarchitecture security research has discovered vulnerabilities in Intel Data Directed I/O (DDIO) and Intel/AMD micro-op caches.
His research has been selected as an IEEE Micro Top Picks in computer architecture based on novelty and long-term impact and a Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security among papers published in the six-year period between 2014 and 2019.