Dr. Yuval Yarom
Short Biography
Yuval Yarom (@yuvalyarom) is a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Adelaide, where he heads the security domain in the Centre for Distributed and Intelligent Technologies. His research focuses on the security implications of the discrepancy between the nominal and the true behaviour of processors, with a focus on side channel and speculative execution attacks.
Talk Title: Mastik: a Toolkit for Micro-Architectural Channel Attacks
To achieve the performance requirements of modern age computation, the microarchitectural design of processors deviates from the intuitive model programmers use. Multiple techniques for exploiting the discrepancy between the two models to leak information between programs have been developed in recent years. While the theory on which these techniques are built is well understood, implementing them is still a challenge due to the need to bridge between the clean theory presented in research publications and the realities of the undocumented processor behaviour these rely upon. Mastik, a toolkit for microarchitectural side channel attacks, aims to bridge this gap. It aims to provide a set of primitives that implement known attack techniques, to allow researchers to experiment with the attacks and with defences. In this talk I will present an introduction to microarchitectural attacks with a focus on cache-based attacks, and show how Mastik allows experimenting with these with ease.