Join us at noon on Tuesday, April 19 in the Coda building or by Zoom as  Kazem Taram, a Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego, presents a lecture to SCP’s faculty and students. More information on the talk and the zoom link are below.

Defusing the Tension between Security and Performance with Secure Microarchitectures

Abstract: 

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.