Taram's Novel Research Wins Multiple Prestigious Awards in Hardware Security

09-09-2024

Assistant Professor Mohammadkazem Taram

Taram Awarded IEEE Micro Top Picks, distinguished paper at ASPLOS conference and honorable mention from Intel's Hardware Security Academic Award Program

Assistant Professor Mohammadkazem Taram’s paper in collaboration with co-authors from UT Austin, UC San Diego, Intel Labs, Google, Fastly, and Rivos, "Going Beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible and Secure Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI," has garnered significant recognition in the field of computer architecture and hardware security for its groundbreaking impact. 

“The beauty of HFI is that it drastically reduces the overhead of Sandboxing without the need to drastically change the processor architecture," said Taram."It brings support for in-process isolation to modern processors through a simple, non-intrusive, yet effective and efficient architectural extension. ” 

This paper presents Hardware-assisted Fault Isolation (HFI), a straightforward upgrade to current processors that enhances security, flexibility, and efficiency for isolating processes. HFI overcomes the drawbacks of existing software-based isolation (SFI) methods, such as high runtime costs, difficulty scaling, vulnerability to Spectre attacks, and compatibility issues with existing code. HFI can easily work with current SFI systems like WebAssembly or directly isolate native programs without requiring any changes.

Published at Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2023, this paper won a distinguished paper award. ASPLOS is an eminent academic forum for multidisciplinary computer systems research spanning hardware, software, and their interaction.

Taram’s paper also received an honorable mention from Intel's Hardware Security Academic Award program. Out of 60 nominations from 240 authors across 100 institutions and 17 countries, only three papers were recognized, one winner and two honorable mentions. 

Most recently, this research was selected for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Micro Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences. This prestigious publication collects some of the most significant research papers in computer architecture based on novelty and potential for long-term impact.

Taram's work on HFI advances computer architecture and hardware security by addressing the inherent limitations of traditional software-based isolation methods. HFI paves the way for more secure, efficient, and scalable processor designs. The widespread recognition from prestigious conferences and institutions underscores the far-reaching impact of this research. 

 

About the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University

Founded in 1962, the Department of Computer Science was created to be an innovative base of knowledge in the emerging field of computing as the first degree-awarding program in the United States. The department continues to advance the computer science industry through research. US News & Reports ranks Purdue CS #8 in computer engineering and #19 and #18 overall in graduate and undergraduate computer science. Additionally the program is ranked 6th in cybersecurity, 8th in software engineering, 13th in systems, 15th in programming languages and data analytics, and 18th in theory. Graduates of the program are able to solve complex and challenging problems in many fields. Our consistent success in an ever-changing landscape is reflected in the record undergraduate enrollment, increased faculty hiring, innovative research projects, and the creation of new academic programs. The increasing centrality of computer science in academic disciplines and society, and new research activities—centered around foundations and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as natural language processing, human computer interaction, vision, and robotics, as well as systems and security—are the future focus of the department. cs.purdue.edu