Retbleed in the news

We disclosed Retbleed during July patch Tuesday. Retbleed shows that similar to indirect branches, return instructions leak sensitive information during speculative execution. Retbleed was covered in an ETH news article and many news items in popular media such as WIRED, Ars Technica, The Register, Watson, Heise and podcasts such as Security Now!

QIF Europe award

Patrick Jattke was awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Europe for his research proposal on using machine learning techniques to improve Rowhammer testing. The competition was fierce, with Patrick’s proposal being the only one that was awarded in the cyber security domain. Qualcomm’s press release with the description of Patrick’s project can be found here.

Federally funded ERC grant

Kaveh Razavi has received an ERC Starting Grant to investigate proactive microarchitectural security at the hardware design stage. Due to Switzerland’s non-association status, the grant will be paid out by the Swiss federal government. We have multiple open PhD and PostDoc positions. Consider applying if you are interested in the topics of hardware and systems…

Two presentations at S&P

COMSEC has two presentations this week at the annual S&P conference. Blacksmith shows that all TRR mitigations deployed in (LP)DDR4 devices are vulnerable to non-uniform access patterns and ProTRR shows how one can build a space-refresh optimal in-DRAM TRR mitigation with principled security guarantees. We also have a paper called Spring at the co-located WOOT…

Blacksmith in the news

Our recent efforts in the area of DRAM Security resulted in the discovery of new non-uniform access patterns that can bypass all currently deployed TRR mitigations on recent (LP)DDR4 devices and revive Rowhammer attacks on new devices. Citing the paper: “after almost a decade of research and deployed in-DRAM mitigations, we are perhaps in a…

Pwnie award for BlindSide

BlindSide won this year’s Pwnie award in the most innovative research category. BlindSide is a result of a multi-year collaboration between researchers from Stevens Institute of Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and ETH Zurich (COMSEC). Assume that drug A cures disease A and drug B cures diseases B. If a person has both diseases A and…

1st DRAMSec Workshop

Together with Stefan Saroiu (Microsoft), we are organizing the first First Workshop on DRAM Security (DRAMSec) co-located with ISCA 2021. We have an excellent TPC representing industry and academic experts to bring you a very nice program including paper presentations, a keynote and a lively panel. If you are interested in the topic, please consider…