Silvan Niederer joined as a PhD student starting November 2023.
All posts by krazavi
Best Paper Award for Phantom
Phantom won the best paper award at MICRO’23! Phantom shows the security implications of pre-decode speculation that is fundamental in achieving high performance. Phantom explains the root-cause of previous transient execution attacks such as Retbleed or Spectre-SLS and it can also be used as a building block in other attacks, such as Inception.
Best BSc thesis award for Zhenrong Lang
The bachelor thesis of Zhenrong Lang on studying and generalizing the half-double effect has won a best BSc award in the department. Congratulations! We called patterns that trigger these new effects Blaster and wrote a paper about them which you can read here.
ETH medal for Daniël Trujillo
Daniël Trujillo has received an ETH medal for his master thesis on Inception and Phantom. The ETH medal is awarded to the very top master theses every year (read more here). Congratulations!
Inception at USENIX Security
Inception is a new class of transient execution attacks which we made public in August during USENIX Security. Inception can leak arbitrary memory from the kernel on all AMD Zen CPUs including the latest Zen 4 CPU. Due to its impact, Inception was featured on ETH news and many tech and popular news outlets. Examples…
REGA at S&P
COMSEC had one presentation at the flagship S&P conference this year. REGA shows how to build a stateless and scalable in-DRAM Rowhammer mitigation by cleanly separating the duties of DRAM’s sense amplifiers. REGA also includes the first open source model of a modern DRAM chip called REM.
Golden owl for COMSEC
The student association of ETH Zurich has awarded D-ITET’s 2022 Golden Owl to the COMSEC group for good teaching. According to the feedback, the students appreciated our efforts around the revamped Computer Engineering course in the ITET’s BSc program which features a new educational OS kernel that runs on top of RISC-V CPUs. Kudos to…
Presentation at MICRO
Flavien Solt presented his paper at MICRO’22 conference on how design validation and testing tools can be improved using a novel categorization of existing errata documents. More information can be found here.
Welcome Katharina Ceesay-Seitz!
Katharina Ceesay-Seitz joined as a PhD student starting October 2022.
USENIX Security presentations
COMSEC has two presentations this week at the annual USENIX Security conference. CellIFT shows a novel approach for scalable Information Flow Tracking (IFT) in RTL. CellIFT is open source and ready to be used on in many new projects that can benefit from IFT, such as finding hardware vulnerabilities. Retbleed shows that return instructions leak information…