Events Calendar

ECE Seminar: Tamara Lehman

Title: Secure, Efficient and High Performance Computing: A Computer Architecture Perspective

Abstract: New computing models and emerging microarchitectures introduce new sets of security risks. Microarchitectural attacks have presented many challenges in the computer architecture community and in this talk I will present a few of the methods that the Boulder Computer Architecture Research Lab (BCARL) has been studying in order to address these vulnerabilities. In this talk I will introduce two of the main microarchitectural attacks that my group is looking to mitigate, cache side-channel and transient execution attacks. Each attack will be presented along with the corresponding defense mechanism we are investigating. I will first introduce how we can leverage emerging memory technologies such as near memory processing to defend and identify microarchitectural side-channel attacks. Then I will discuss a promising approach for mitigating transient execution attacks called SMAD, that instead of limiting data propagation based on transient state, inspects memory addresses for identifying odd memory access patterns. Finally, I will introduce a platform in which we embed a security monitor into a processor simulator to aid the security evaluation of microarchitectural designs.

Bio: Tamara Silbergleit Lehman is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science department and she is a member of the Colorado Research Center for Democracy and Technology. Her work focuses on all aspects of computer security from the microarchitectural perspective. Her research interests span a wide array of topics on the intersection of computer architecture and security, including high-performance and secure microarchitectures, security simulation methodologies, 5G network security, machine learning security, and social media platform security. She has been recognized for both her service and research with various awards, including the more recent IEEE Computer Society T&C Rising Star Service Award. She completed her PhD at Duke University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department in 2019. Before doing her PhD, she completed a Masters of Engineering degree at Duke University in the same department and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida in Industrial and Systems Engineering.