Talk Title:

Future of Computer Architecture and Hardware Security

Abstract:

Computer architecture has been undergoing a revolution with increasing prevalence of heterogeneous, specialized, and massively-parallel hardware systems, to accelerate major data-intensive workloads and enable better system scaling. Hardware for novel computing paradigms (e.g., processing in memory, quantum computing) is already being prototyped and commercialized, and system complexity is increasing.

At the same time, hardware security issues at the very low levels have been causing great concern and threatening the benefits and future of even old computing paradigms like speculative execution and main memory (DRAM) scaling. We are at an exciting time when the tensions between low-level architecture/technology innovations and system security problems such innovations expose are being heavily examined and such tensions are likely to increase for the foreseeable future.

In this talk, we will examine the interplay between computer architecture and system security in modern and emerging computing systems. We will cover major trends in computer architecture and discuss how they may impact hardware and system security.

We will examine potential threats as we see them, especially in areas related to the memory hierarchy and data access. We will also examine the requirements security goals may demand from future hardware architectures and technologies. We aim to provide directions that we believe would be fruitful and important to study to proactively address security challenges of emerging hardware architectures and design fundamentally-secure computing systems.

Speaker Bio:

Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems.

He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google. He received various honors for his research, including the IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing (for the original RowHammer paper), Persistent Impact Prize of the Non-Volatile Memory Systems Workshop, Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Test of Time Award, IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award and a healthy number of best paper or “Top Pick” paper recognitions at various computer systems, architecture, and security venues. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe.

His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube, and his research group makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts freely available online (https://safari.ethz.ch/). For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.