Date: November 20, 2015
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: 432 Newell Drive, Gainesville, Florida, 32611
Host: UF CISE Department
Admission: This event is free and open to the public.

Side Channels in Multi-Tenant Environments

Abstract: Due to the massive adoption of computing platforms that consolidate potentially distrustful tenants’ applications on common hardware—both large (public clouds) and small (smartphones)—the security provided by these platforms to their tenants is increasingly being scrutinized. In this talk we will review highlights from the last several years of research on a long-suspected but, until recently, largely hypothetical attack vector on such platforms, namely side-channel attacks. In these attacks, one tenant learns sensitive information about another tenant simply by running on the same hardware with it, but without violating the logical access control enforced by the platform’s isolation software (virtual machine monitor or operating system). We will then summarize various strategies we have explored to defend against side-channel attacks in their various forms, both inexpensive defenses against specific attacks and more holistic but expensive protections.

Biography: Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include all areas of computer and communications security and distributed computing. His professional responsibilities during his career so far have included Director of Secure Systems Research at Bell Labs; founding Technical Director of CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; program chair for the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society; and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, among others. Dr.Reiter was named an ACM Fellow in 2008 and an IEEE Fellow in 2014.