The TEA O'Clock of Hardware Security Research

In this talk, I’ll give an overview of our recent and ongoing efforts in the area of Transient Execution Attacks (TEAs). The talk will cover how we started working in the area shortly after the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown (by chance!), our attempts to systematically analyze the attack surface, our efforts to devise mitigations and vulnerability finding solutions, and, above all, our attempts to answer the fundamental question: “What’s the residual attack surface 5 years after the fact and what can be done about it?”.

Cristiano Giuffrida is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests span across several aspects of Computer Systems, with a focus on systems security. He received a Ph.D. cum laude from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2014. He was awarded the Roger Needham Award at EuroSys and the Dennis M. Ritchie Award at SOSP for the best PhD dissertation in Computer Systems in 2015 (Europe and worldwide). He was also awarded a VENI grant (the Dutch Equivalent of a NSF CAREER Award, PhD+3) in 2017, a VMware Early Career Faculty Award in 2020, a Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award at EuroSys in 2022, and the Dutch Prize for ICT research in 2023.