How formal reasoning enables the detection of microarchitectural side channels

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• Jana Hofmann (Microsoft)
• Friday 27 October 2023, 13:00-14:00
• Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, LT2.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yuting Shang.

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss how a transition from a theory-heavy PhD to more application-oriented research in industry might look like, and why for me, that step did not feel so big after all. During my PhD, I worked on so-called ‘hyperproperties’, an abstract class of properties that relate multiple execution traces of a system. I developed logics for hyperproperties, studied their decidability, and proposed algorithms for their verification and synthesis problems. Today, in my role as researcher at Microsoft, I focus on modelling information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. I will show how these two topics connect and how hyperproperty reasoning techniques enable an efficient modelling and testing process to detect information leakage in modern CPUs.

Bio: Jana Hofmann is a postdoctoral researcher at Azure Research, Microsoft, where she works on detecting and preventing information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. Before joining Microsoft, Jana obtained a Ph.D. from Saarland University/CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany), where she was advised by Bernd Finkbeiner. She also holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

This talk is part of the Women@CL Events series.

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