CASA Distinguished Lecture with Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, 9.11.2021

November 9, 2021 - 2:00 pm (UTC +1)
 

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Abstract. The large attack surface of applications and commodity operating systems has motivated academia and industry to develop and deploy trusted computing technologies that promise to provide trust anchors and trusted execution environments on computing platforms. The aim is to protect sensitive data and applications from various software-based attacks. However, the currently deployed trusted computing architectures seem to struggle in keeping those promises. Particularly in the face of the next generation security threats such as cross-layer attacks. Those attacks reach far beyond exploiting micro-architectural flaws and affect a wide range of computing platforms. They disrupting traditional threat models that have mainly focused on software-only vulnerabilities.

In this talk, he presents a brief overview of Trusted Computing landscape, its promises, pitfalls and opportunities. Then he discusses the recent trends in building open security architectures (e.g., RISC-V-based). Also he briefly talks about the insights he and his team gained on cross-layer attacks in the course of the world’s largest hardware security competition. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi concludes with future directions for trusted computing and the corresponding challenges.

Biograph. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a professor of Computer Science and the head of the System Security Lab at Technical University of Darmstadt. He has been leading several Collaborative Research Labs with Intel and Huawei. Prior to academia, he worked in R&D of IT-enterprises, including Ericsson Telecommunications. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Saarland. Also Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi currently serves on the editorial board of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP. For his influential research on Trusted and Trustworthy Computing he received the renowned German “Karl Heinz Beckurts” award. In 2018, he received the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for dedicated research, education, and management leadership in the security community. Furthermore, in 2021 he was honored with Intel Academic Leadership Award at USENIX Security conference for his influential research on cybersecurity and in particular on hardware-assisted security.

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