Kolloquium WiSe 2018-19

Speaker

Prof. Thomas Eisenbarth - Universität Lübeck

When: Mo, 26.11.2018, 17:00

Where: Room B-201

Topic

Microarchitectural Attacks on modern CPUs

Language: German or English according to preference

Abstract

From cloud servers to IoT devices, modern CPUs provide a complex microarchitecture to ensure high performance while easing parallelization. Unrelated services often run in parallel on the same platform and share resources. At the logic level, sandboxing ensures isolation between services. However, isolation is not perfect, and side channels caused by the CPU's shared microarchitecture can result in unintended information leakage across processes and virtual machines. For instance, cache attacks that exploit access time variations when retrieving data from the cache or the memory are a powerful tool to extract information from a co-located process.

This talk provides an overview of how microarchitectural features of modern CPUs such as shared caches and speculative execution can be abused to circumvent isolation techniques. It will be shown how the resulting attacks can be applied to extract sensitive information from privileged processes and even across processor boundaries. Modern attack techniques such as cache attacks as well as the infamous Spectre and Meltdown attacks will be presented and discussed.

Bio

Thomas Eisenbarth ist Professor für IT Sicherheit an der Universität zu Lübeck. Er studierte bis 2006 Elektro- und Informationstechnik an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, wo er bis 2009 am Horst Görtz Institut für IT-Sicherheit promovierte. Ab 2010 forschte er als Assistant Professor am Center for Cryptography and Information Security (CCIS) an der Florida Atlantic University. 2012 wechselte er an das Vernam Lab for Security and Privacy am Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Seit August 2017 ist er als Direktor des Instituts für IT Sicherheit an der Universität zu Lübeck. - Seine Forschungsinteressen umfassen Systemsicherheit und sichere Mikroarchitekturen, angewandte Kryptografie, sowie Seitenkanalangriffe und Gegenmaßnahmen.

Thomas Eisenbarth is a Professor at the Institute for IT Security at University of Lübeck. Thomas received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where he worked as a member of the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security. He spent two years at the Center for Cryptology and Information Security (CCIS) at Florida Atlantic University. In 2012 he joined the ECE Department and Vernam Lab for Security and Privacy at WPI. Since 2017 he serves as Director Institute for IT Security at University of Lübeck. - His research interests include system security, applied cryptography, side channel attacks and countermeasures.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Hannes Federrath
Prof. Dr. Mathias Fischer