The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security during the summer of 2022 (exact date and location TBD). We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Workshop organizers Simha Sethumadhavan (Columbia University) and Tim Sherwood (University of California Santa Barbara) will host an orientation webinar from 1 – 2:30 PM ET on Thursday, January 13th, 2022 to outline the goals of the workshop and expand on what they are looking for in the white papers. Following the pre-recorded presentations there will be an opportunity for Q&A with the speakers. Register to attend the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security during the summer of 2022 (exact date and location TBD). We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. From election security to critical health applications, trustworthy hardware is the bedrock of a modern free and healthy society. Once niche and arcane, the field of hardware security has recently become one of the most pressing issues in cybersecurity. Microarchitectural side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown have shown how pervasive, dangerous, and hard-to-fix a hardware attack could be; integrity attacks such as Rowhammer and CLKSCREW show […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Mark D. Hill, the Gene M. Amdahl and John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chair Emeritus of the CCC Council. This episode was recorded prior to Dr. Hill joining Microsoft as a Partner Hardware Architect with Azure. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, deterministic replay and transactional memory. In this episode Hill discusses the importance of computer architecture, the 3C model of cache behavior, and overcoming the […]

Computing technologies have revolutionized the world, from how we grow food to our social interactions. At the core of this revolution is computing hardware, the shrinking of which has allowed for powerful computation in the palm of your hand. Unfortunately, Moore’s law is coming to an end and we will no longer be able to build more powerful computers using traditional CMOS-based hardware. What other bases for computing hardware are out there? The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the Next Generation Computer Hardware scientific session at the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in February to discuss this topic and share some potential avenues for future research. […]

The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin and CCC Cybersecurity Task Force Chair Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan. In recent days, several sources—listed below—have reported on two security design flaws in computer hardware that involve undesirable interactions between processor speculative execution and memory protection, but whose implications are still emerging. With speculative execution, a processor core uses heuristics to guess the next step for execution. Programs execute faster when the guess is correct. When speculation picks an incorrect direction, a core should hide any learned information from user-level software. With these newly disclosed flaws, incorrect outcomes from speculation […]

The next WATCH talk, called The CHERI Processor: Revisiting the Hardware-Software Interface for Security is Monday July 6, 2015 from Noon-1pm EST. The presenter is Dr Robert N.M. Watson. Robert is a University Lecturer in Systems, Security, and Architecture at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He has a strong interests in open-source software, is on the board of directors of the FreeBSD Foundation, and was founder of the FreeBSD Project. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Abstract   The last five years, supported by DARPA’s CRASH and MRC research programmes, SRI International and the University of Cambridge have been engaged in a project to revisit the fundamentals […]