Speaker: Prof. Ajay Joshi
Time: Friday, 09 August 2019, 10:30am
Venue: Conference Room, 01st Floor, KRESIT, IIT Bombay

Abstract:
Today, all computing systems, from Internet-of-Things (IoT)-embedded devices
to large-scale distributed cloud servers remain vulnerable to exploitation.
To reduce the overhead of software-level security solutions against various
exploitations, recently, leading processor companies have introduced several
hardware-level security extensions. Unfortunately, implementing new security
extensions in processors is a lengthy and costly process. To overcome the
shortcomings of this process, researchers endeavor to use existing hardware
features in modern processors to provide security solutions. To this end,
researchers use Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) as well as debugging and
profiling tools to collect program execution information, which is then used
to detect anomalous or malicious behavior in software. However, HPCs provide
only a fixed pool of simple events, and cannot be programmed to detect new or
complex attacks. This limits their applicability significantly. At the same time, the software-based debugging and profiling tools have large overhead and do
not necessarily have full visibility of the hardware. To address these
shortcomings, we have developed a programmable hardware monitor (PHMon) and
its complete system framework. In this talk, I’ll present PHMon’s
microarchitecture design. I’ll also discuss the system framework that
includes PHMon’s interface with an in-order single-issue RISC-V processor as
well as the overlying operating system and user-space application. Our PHMon
can be employed for a wide range of applications from protecting the
computing system against various security threats to online profiling for
system management. In this talk, I’ll discuss the use of PHMon as a shadow
stack for detecting and preventing buffer overflow attacks.

Speaker Profile:
Ajay Joshi received his Ph. D. degree from the ECE Department at Georgia Tech
in 2006. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS Department
at MIT. In 2009, he joined the ECE department at Boston University, where he
is currently an Associate Professor. He was a Visiting Researcher at Google
in 2017-18. His research interests span across various aspects of VLSI design
including circuits and architectures for communication and computation. He
received the NSF CAREER Award in 2012, Boston University ECE Department’s
Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014, Google Faculty Research Award 2018,
and Best Paper Award at ASIACCS 2018. He currently serves as the Associate
Editor for IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems.

Organization:
Boston University

Host: Prof. Ashwin Gumaste, Institute Professor, IIT Bombay.