News
Date for Seminar SlotWritten on 27.10.26 by Jan Reineke In order to find a regular slot that suits all participants, we have added two options to the poll here: Please update your availability by Wednesday 23:59. |
Paper DistributionWritten on 27.10.26 by Jan Reineke Please indicate your preferences for the seminar papers using the following poll by Wednesday 23:59:
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Security at the Hardware-Software Interface:
Information-Flow Tracking and Hardware-Software Contracts
Description
Spectre, Meltdown, and other microarchitectural attacks have been in the limelight in recent years. These attacks exploit subtle timing and behavioral differences of processors that are caused by microarchitectural optimizations such as caches and speculative execution to gain access to secret information.
How can we build systems that do not suffer from such vulnerabilities? Different communities have contributed related but distinct approaches to this question. In this course we will study work from two communities:
- Hardware information-flow tracking (IFT) determines how information propagates through hardware. It can be used to analyze a microarchitecture's information flows both dynamically and statically. We will study recent advances that make IFT applicable to modern processors.
- Hardware-software contracts capture potential information leakage due to microarchitectural side channels at the software level, enabling secure programming, e.g. of cryptographic algorithms, in a rigorous manner. We will study recent work to test and verify hardware-software contracts.
Each participant will give a presentation of an assigned paper, followed by a group discussion. All students are expected to read each paper carefully and to actively participate in the discussions. Each student will also write a report about their experience in the seminar.
Requirements
Basic knowledge of computer architecture (e.g. due to System Architecture) is required.
Knowledge of security and formal methods is a plus, but not required.
Format
- Each student is assigned one of the two groups of papers:
- each student is designated as the presenter of one of the papers from his/her group (the presentation should be about 25 minutes long)
- each student needs to read all papers from his/her group and submit a one-page summary + 3 questions about each paper (excluding the paper they are presenting)
- The presenter of each paper needs to deliver a practice talk to their advisor in December.
- Summaries+questions have to be delivered 24 hours prior to the respective session.
- Every student shall write an report on their experience in the seminar. This experience report shall be delivered at the end of the term (28.2.2027).
Grading Scheme
| Seminar | Weight | |
|---|---|---|
| Presentation | Practice presentation of paper | 50% |
| Actual presentation of paper | ||
| Summaries of other papers + questions | 20% | |
| Participation during sessions | 15% | |
| Experience Report | 15% | |
Calendar
Practice talk sessions are scheduled in December taking into account the constraints of presenters and advisors. We will group students for the practice talks, so that they can benefit from the feedback and the practice talks of their peers in their preparation.
Four sessions of 1h30 each are planned (dates are tentative):
- 1st session: Tuesday, 05.01.2027, 10-12
- 2nd session: Tuesday, 12.01.2027, 10-12
- 3rd session: Tuesday, 19.01.2027, 10-12
- 4th session: Tuesday, 26.01.2027, 10-12
- Experience report delivery: 28.02.2027