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ESE Fall Seminar – “Reflections on learning about learning: A case study on where ideas come from in (In-)Secure Processor Design”
October 8 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
When it comes to security, hardware is the new software. Starting some years ago, this shift was made plain when a litany of attacks, such as “Spectre/Meltdown” and “Rowhammer”, shattered our confidence in processors as a root of trust. Making matters worse, modern processors are incredibly complex, and have (as it turns out) been designed without proper attention given to security for decades. As a result, it’s not clear the extent of the problem or where to start to fix it—forcing both attackers and defenders into an arms race whose endpoint is unclear.
This talk will start with an overview of my group’s work to help address the processor security problem. I will then describe a specific recent project that we published earlier this year. Finally, I will describe an eight-year journey that led to this project, while trying to highlight the many people responsible and the various twists and turns that our thinking took along the way.
Christopher Fletcher
Associate Professor of Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
Chris Fletcher is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has broad interests ranging from Computer Architecture to Security to High-Performance Computing (ranging from theory to practice). Before joining Berkeley, he spent six wonderful years as an Assistant Professor at UIUC, six years as a PhD student at MIT before that, and finally/firstly four years as an undergrad also at Berkeley. He considers this a rather strange loop given that it started with his getting rejected from Berkeley as an undergrad.