Assumptions: They Make An… Insecure System

Jason Lowe-Power, UC Davis

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

In this talk, I will describe how Meltdown and Spectre break programmer expectations and cause a security nightmare. Meltdown and Spectre shocked the IT world when first publicly reported 9 months ago because these vulnerabilities were not bugs or errors in the hardware. Instead, these vulnerabilities target the performance optimizations used in high performance processors for the past 25 years. In this talk, we'll look at how these performance optimizations break programmers' assumptions of how their programs execute and can lead to confidential data leaking in mobile devices, personal computing devices, and shared cloud platforms.