International Winter School on Microarchitectural Security 2022

Today, computing systems are going through the trough of disillusionment related to the prevailing security. The revelations of security and privacy vulnerabilities in microprocessors, both at software and hardware levels, have been appalling. These microarchitectural vulnerabilities affect almost all processors, across virtually all operating systems and architectures. One of the biggest problems in modern computing infrastructure today is that security is not regarded as a system-wide issue and, therefore, preventive measures are vulnerability-specific, limited in scope, and might even create new vulnerabilities. The primary reason behind this is the fact that almost every aspect in modern computing architectures can be subject to the discovery of new attack vector: from computational optimizations to storage elements and interfaces, from end-user applications to the operating system & hypervisors, and from the microarchitecture to the underlying hardware. This trend is getting further momentum, and worse, the complete attack surface is not yet known. The hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that delivers some computational infrastructure and is assumed to be correct. But it might leak critical information as a side effect of software implementation and execution.

Side-channel Attacks (SCAs) and defenses on the microarchitectural level, therefore, have become an important field of research. Side-channel attacks exploit existing vulnerabilities in order to extract privileged information at both physical and computational and storage levels. In order to enhance the resistance of cryptographic and security critical implementations within the design phase, countermeasures and analysis techniques are mandatory.

The MIC-SEC winter school offers academic and industrial talks along with hands-on experience on attacks, software and hardware countermeasure techniques with a special focus on side-channel attacks. The school will offer a round table discussion with industrial and academic partners to foresee the future of computing in security. The scope of the MIC-SEC winter school is as follows:

• Side-Channel attacks and defenses 
• Role of Machine Learning in microarchitectural security
• Microarchitectural security at the interfaces of hardware and software, in particular industrial perspectives

MIC-SEC offers an opportunity to young researchers such as PhD students and research engineers from academia and industry with lectures and hands-on experiences to get to know the domain of microarchitectural security. It will allow the participants to practise theoretical principles in reality. Attending students are strongly advised to actively take part in the poster session held at the MIC-SEC winter school. Furthermore, there will be an opportunity for senior PhD students and research engineers to do a short presentation of their research work.