All posts in Awards

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…

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”.

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.

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.

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!

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…

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.

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…

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…

Each year at our annual Hardware Security course we hand out an award to the team with the most impressive demo from their work done during the semester. This year the winning team made a demo of an end-to-end attack that mixes the Flip Feng Shui with bit flips on DDR4 using the TRRespass technique.…