Colloquium “In Hardware We Trust? From TPMs to Enclave Computing on RISC-V”

Invitation to a colloquium organized by the Department of Computer Science, research training group „Cybercrime and Forensic Computing“ and SFB/TR 89 (Invasive Computing):

Tuesday, 20 April 2021, 18:15
online via Zoom: https://fau.zoom.us/j/93355339391

Lecturer:
Professor Dr. Ahmad Sadeghi, TU Darmstadt

Title:
In Hardware We Trust? From TPMs to Enclave Computing on RISC-V

Abstract:
The large attack surface of commodity operating systems has motivated academia and industry to develop novel security architectures that provide strong hardware-assisted protection for sensitive applications using the so-called enclaves. However, deployed enclave architectures often lack important security features, and assume threat models which do not cover cross-layer attacks, such as microarchitectural exploits and beyond. Thus, recent academic research has proposed a new line of enclave architectures with distinct features and more comprehensive threat models, many of which were developed on the open RISC-V architecture.

In this talk, we present a brief overview of the Trusted Computing Landscape, its promises and pitfalls. We discuss selected RISC-V based enclave architectures recently proposed, discuss their features, limitations and open challenges which we aim to tackle in our current research using our security architecture CURE. Finally, we shortly report on the insights we gained on cross-layers attacks in the world’s largest hardware security competitions franchise that we have been organizing with Intel and Texas AMU since 2018.

Short Biography:
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a professor of Computer Science at the TU Darmstadt, Germany. He is the head of the Systems Security Lab at the Cybersecurity Research Center of TU Darmstadt. He has also been leading three different Intel Collaborative Research Labs at TU Darmstadt since 2012. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany. Prior to academia, he worked in R&D of Telecommunications enterprises, amongst others Ericsson Telecommunications. He has been continuously contributing to security and privacy research. He was Editor-In-Chief of IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, served 5 years on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), and is currently on the editorial boards of ACM Books, 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. This award honors excellent scientific achievements with high impact on industrial innovations in Germany. In 2018, Prof. Sadeghi received the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for dedicated research, education, and management leadership in the security community and for pioneering contributions in content protection, mobile security and hardware-assisted security. SIGSAC is ACM’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control.