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…

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…

Best Demo at HWSec’20

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.…

Pwnie award for TRRespass

The annual Pwnie awards ceremony was held virtually at the BlackHat Europe conference this week. Pwnie awards celebrate some of the best and worst events of the year in the information security community. This year, TRRespass won the Pwnie for the most innovative research. From the awards page: “Awarded to the researcher or team who…

Best paper award at MOBILESoft

“Leave My Apps Alone!” won the best paper award at the MOBILESoft conference. This project studies the extent to which Andorid apps secretly (and sometimes unknowingly) retrieve the list of installed apps. The results show that this is unfortunately prevalent with serious privacy concerns for the users. This paper was featured at Ars Technica and…

TRRespass wins the best paper award at S&P

TRRespass won the best paper award at the Security and Privacy conference last week. TRRespass sheds light on the little-known Target Row Refresh protection that is supposed to protect systems against Rowhammer bit flips. The paper shows for the first time that recent systems employ the mitigation inside DRAM chips. A deep analysis shows that…