Defusing the Tension between Security and Performance with Secure Microarchitectures
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"The tension between security and performance has become more painful in recent years. In the context of processor architecture, we are observing a large influx of new attacks that appear regularly, each exploiting a crucial performance optimization, threatening to unwind decades of architectural gains. This talk will cover how we attempt to defuse this tension. I first describe an example that shows how performance optimizations can have devastating security implications. Then, I present novel secure and fast architectures to mitigate vulnerabilities in two of the most crucial performance optimizations in modern processors: Speculative Execution and Simultaneous Multithreading.
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Assistant Professor at Purdue University