The PhD dissertation of Flavien Solt has won an ETH medal, given to the top 8% of dissertations at ETH Zurich. Congratulations!
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Welcome Tobias Kovats!
Tobias Kovats will join as a PhD student starting January 2025.
PhD graduations in 2024
COMSEC had her first PhD graduations in 2024! Congratulations to Dr. Flavien Solt, Dr. Michele Marazzi, and Dr. Johannes Wikner.
HybriDIFT at ICCAD and muCFI at CCS
In October, COMSEC presented HybriDIFT at ICCAD 2024 and muCFI at CCS 2024. HybriDIFT shows how to scale hardware dynamic IFT to large memories by specially treating implicit flows in the design. HybriDIFT is the first dynamic IFT solution that can scale to a serious RISC-V core such as OpenC910. muCFI introduces a new security…
Best BSc thesis award for Max Wipfli
The bachelor thesis of Max Wipfli on building Rowhammer attacks on AMD CPUs has won a best BSc award in the department. Congratulations! The new attack, that we called ZenHammer, could also trigger the first publicly known DDR5 bit flip on AMD Zen4-based platform. We later published an extended version of Max’s thesis at USENIX…
Cascade and ZenHammer at USENIX Security
COMSEC presented two papers at USENIX Security 2024 this month. Cascade shows that generating highly randomized but valid programs is highly effective in finding bugs in open-source RISC-V CPUs. In fact, it finds more bugs than all previous hardware fuzzers combined! ZenHammer shows how one can trigger bit flips from AMD Zen-based CPUs. ZenHammer triggered…
HiFi-DRAM at ISCA
COMSEC presented HiFi-DRAM at the top ISCA conference in Buenos Aires. We used Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) with Field Ion Beam (FIB) to reverse engineer sense amplifier designs in commodity DDR4 and DDR5 chips from all major DRAM vendors. HiFi-DRAM shows that many critical assumptions made by DRAM researchers unfortunately do not hold up in…
Welcome Ali Hajiabadi!
Dr. Ali Hajiabadi started as a postdoctoral researcher in July 2024.
Jochen Liedtke award for Kaveh Razavi
Kaveh Razavi received the Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award at EuroSys’24. The award was created in 2014 by ACM EuroSys to reward junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. Kaveh was awarded for “his countless and fundamental high-impact contributions to systems security”.
Welcome Sandro Rüegge!
Sandro Rüegge joined as a PhD student starting April 2024.