Next SSL seminar will take place on Thursday, September 27th at 1.30 pm in room A008.

Clémentine Maurice (CNRS, IRISA) will give a presentation entitled “Evolution of microarchitectural attacks”.

Hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly, just executing instructions and outputing a result. However, the internal state of the hardware leaks information about the programs that are executing, paving the way for covert or side-channel attacks.

In this presentation, we will cover the evolution of microarchitectural attacks. We will first have a look at a historical recap of past attacks and how the field evolved in the last years. We will focus on two recent trends, that are practical attacks (by demonstrating robust covert channels in the cloud) and the increase of the attack surface. We will conclude with the different challenges and open questions that the field is facing.