The infamous Meltdown and Spectre attacks found in 2018 brought to the limelight an evolving class of security threats: hardware-level covert channel attacks. These vulnerabilities exist at the CPU level, rendering them impossible to patch without costly software mitigations and allowing low-permission attackers to read arbitrary kernel memory and access private data in a program’s address space. Since the discovery of Meltdown and Spectre, research groups worldwide have uncovered several covert channel vulnerabilities across various hardware platforms. The objective of our project is to explore these attacks, reverse-engineering modern processors to shed light upon any additional vulnerabilities so that we may explore effective mitigations in the future.

I’ve been fascinated by the intersection of hardware and software systems since I was seven years old, and once at MIT, SuperUROP seemed like the best way for me to gain real-world experience in the field. I am excited to take part in the program this year to build connections with exemplary researchers around my lab and hopefully make a splash in the rapidly growing field of architectural security!