Freedom vs. Security in Computer Systems
Is it time to consider designing and operating computer systems with an “off-by-default” attitude to proactively defend against such attacks?
Democratizing Design for Future Computing Platforms
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been working hard on various white papers over the past couple of months and slowly releasing them. You can see all of them here. Today, we highlight one paper in particular, called Democratizing Design for Future Computing...
Die Stacking is Happening
(This blog is written to celebrate the two-year anniversary for the worlds’ first commercial processor with die-stacking technology, which was released on 6/16/2015, as AMD Fury X GPU) Many of you who attended MICRO 2013 may still remember the keynote speech...
If You Build It, Will They Come?
All hardware companies face a conundrum. Should they build a riskier product that has a higher probability of failure, or should they continue the evolutionary trend of their current products? The safe thing to do, and one that many customers may ask for, is the...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART IV)
What should vendors do when they discover that a hardware 0-day has been used to exploit systems built on their product? Some vulnerabilities may permit vendors to patch the vulnerability using microcode updates. For instance, a mitigation for the row hammer DRAM...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART III)
What should academics do if they come across a hardware 0-day attack? Obviously, disseminate. But before the vulnerability is made public, it is important to responsibly disclose the vulnerability to the vendor to give them a chance to fix it. If the vendor determines...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART II)
What should governments do when they discover a hardware 0-day? In the US, as a matter of policy, any vulnerability that is deemed to affect critical infrastructure is disclosed to the vendors by the government [VEP]. The government can hide vulnerabilities (and...
HARDWARE 0-DAYS: PUBLISH, SELL OR HOARD? (PART I)
[Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a series of micro-blogs over four consecutive days.] 0-day security exploits are attacks that use vulnerabilities that are unknown to a vendor. They are referred to as 0-days because the vendor knows about them for zero...
Preserving the Virtual Memory Abstraction
As computer architects, one of our key tasks is to propose abstractions that improve system programmability in a manner that stands the test of time. One such abstraction, that has been crucial to the success of computing, is the concept of virtual memory. In this...
Accelerators in data centers: the systems perspective
In this blogpost I share what I learned at the Seventh Workshop on Multi-core and Rack-scale Systems (MaRS) co-located with the EuroSYS Conference on Computer Systems held in Belgrade in April. It is a small but vigorous interdisciplinary workshop that focuses on the...Subscribe
