Dr. Chris Fletcher

Assistant Professor, UIUC

Title: The rise of the insecure processor: What we have learned and future opportunities

Abstract:

The last several years have seen a major shift in how we view microarchitectural security. Starting with Spectre and Meltdown, we have now seen myriad demonstrations of how clever attackers can exploit speculative execution to leak sensitive data (i.e., all of program memory). But speculative execution is just one optimization in modern processors. Are we so sure there are not other, equally dangerous or even worse optimizations lurking in the shadows? This position statement will argue that we as architects should be the ones to answer this question, so as to prevent tomorrow's security "surprises", today.

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Bio

Chris Fletcher is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has broad interests ranging from Computer Architecture to Security to High-Performance Computing (ranging from theory to practice). These and related works have been awarded with election to the DARPA ISAT study group, the Intel Rising Star and Outstanding Researcher Awards, the NSF CAREER award, a Google Faculty Award, the George M. Sprowls Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis in Computer Science at MIT, 15 paper awards, and were listed as one of ten "World Changing Ideas" designations by Scientific American.