Webinar: Toward Durable System Security

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Speaker:

Dr. Todd Austin, University of Michigan / Agita Labs

Abstract:

Wouldn’t it be nice to have months-to-years of warning that your security defenses were going to fall, instead of the usual zero day event where you spend the whole night frantically trying to fix a newly discovered vulnerability before every junior script kiddie on the planet starts pwn’ing your entire customer base! In this talk, I’ll dive into why today’s system security technologies are not very durable and share with you our work toward more durable security defenses. First, I’ll detail the Morpheus secure RISC-V CPU, which successfully fended off all attacks from 535 cybersecurity researchers recruited by DARPA over a three-month period in the summer of 2020. Morpheus implements a RISC-V extension that supports always-encrypted code and pointers with churn. Next, I’ll detail the commercialization of Morpheus in the ØZone Secret Processing Unit (SPU), a high-security coprocessor for secret computation that is attempting to become the first processor to achieve zero software trust, such that no existing software hacks of any kind are capable of penetrating its system security defenses. ØZone creates many avenues for privacy-enhanced computation that could significantly ease the tension between data discovery and data privacy.

Speaker Bio:

Todd Austin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research interests include computer architecture, robust and secure system design, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools and techniques. From 2012-2017, Todd was the director of C-FAR, the Center for Future Architectures Research, a multi-university SRC/DARPA funded center that was seeking technologies to scale the performance and efficiency of future computing systems. Prior to joining academia, Todd was a Senior Computer Architect in Intel’s Microcomputer Research Labs, a product-oriented research laboratory in Hillsboro, Oregon. Todd is the first to take credit (but the last to accept blame) for creating the SimpleScalar Tool Set, a popular collection of computer architecture performance analysis tools. Todd is co-author (with Andrew Tanenbaum of Vrije Universiteit) of the undergraduate computer architecture textbook, “Structured Computer Architecture, 6th Ed.” In addition to his work in academia, Todd is founder of SimpleScalar LLC, and co-founder of Agita Labs Inc. and InTempo Design LLC. In 2002, Todd was a Sloan Research Fellow, and in 2007 he received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for “innovative contributions in Computer Architecture including the SimpleScalar Toolkit and the DIVA and Razor architectures.” Todd is an IEEE Fellow, and he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1996.