cfaed Seminar Series

Dr. sc. Boris Köpf , IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid

Reasoning about the trade-off between security and performance

19.04.2016 (Tuesday) , 11:00 - 12:30
Andreas-Pfitzmann-Bau 1004 (Großes Ratszimmer) , Nöthnitzer Straße 46 , 01187 Dresden

Today's software systems employ a wide variety of techniques for
minimizing the use of resources such as time, memory, and energy. While these
techniques are indispensable for achieving competitive performance, they can
pose a serious threat to security: By reducing the resource consumption on
average (but not in the worst case), they introduce variations that can be exploited
by adversaries for recovering private information about users, or even
cryptographic keys. In this talk I will give examples of attacks against a number
of performance-enhancing features of software and hardware, and I will present
ongoing work on techniques for quantifying the resulting threat and for choosing
the most cost-effective defense.

After completing his Ph.D. in the Information Security
group of ETH Zurich and working as a postdoc in the
Information Security and Cryptography Group of the Max
Planck Institute for Software Systems, Boris Köpf joined the
IMDEA Software Institute Madrid and now holds an Assistant
Research Professor position there. His research covers
quantitative notions of security, techniques for computing
corresponding guarantees for real systems, the analysis of
side-channel attacks (and countermeasures), and privacy-preserving data
publishing.

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