Arts & Sciences Events
[PAST EVENT] Distinguished Colloquium: Challenges in Persistent Secure Execution Environment Design
Title: Challenges in Persistent Secure Execution Environment Design
Distinguished Speaker: Yan Solihin, University of Central Florida
Abstract: Trustworthy software execution is increasingly demanded in multiple situations, including the cloud computing environment where customers execute their software in cloud servers. Customers require strong privacy and security guarantees from a secure trust base in hardware. Recognizing this, chipmakers recently introduced secure execution environment, such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV. A key component of secure execution environment is memory encryption and integrity verification. In this talk, I will discuss how these technologies are not adequate in providing secure execution environment in the future, for several reasons. First, the threat model is incomplete. The pervasiveness of side channel vulnerabilities and attacks in both cloud servers and edge nodes can bypass the protection provided. Second, these technologies are not compatible with new persistent (or non-volatile) memory technologies that are coming online. I will discuss several approaches for addressing these problems.
Bio: Yan Solihin is a Charles N. Millican Chair Professor of Computer Science and Director for Cybersecurity and Privacy Cluster at the University of Central Florida. Prior to joining UCF, he was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, with responsibilities in managing the Computer Systems Research (CSR) cluster, Scalable Parallelism in the eXtreme (SPX), and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC), among others. He was also Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NCSU from 2002 to 2018. In 2017. His past research contributions to Secure Execution Environment include split counter mode encryption, Bonsai Merkle Tree, self-encrypted memory, and ObfusMem, among others. He was elected as an IEEE Fellow, recognized "for contributions to shared cache hierarchies and secure processors.”
He obtained his B.S. degree in computer science from Institut Teknologi Bandung in 1995, B.S. degree in Mathematics from Universitas Terbuka Indonesia in 1995, M.A.Sc degree in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University in 1997, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and 2002. He is a recipient of 2010 and 2005 IBM Faculty Partnership Award, 2004 NSF Faculty Early Career Award, and 1997 AT&T Leadership Award. He is listed in the ISCA and HPCA Hall of Fame. His research interests include computer architecture, memory hierarchy design, non-volatile memory architecture, programming models, and workload cloning. He has published more than 70 papers in computer architecture and performance modeling, and authored 40+ patents. He has released several software packages to the public: ACAPP - a cache performance model toolset, HeapServer - a secure heap management library, Scaltool - parallel program scalability pinpointer, and Fodex - a forensic document examination toolset. He has written two graduate-level textbooks, including Fundamentals of Parallel Multicore Architecture, CRC Press, 2015.
Contact
Adwait Jog and Xu Liu