Seminar 2018-12-20

Date: 2018-12-20
Time: 11:00-12:00
Speaker: Elias Castegren, KTH, Sweden
Title: The Spectre and Meltdown Micro-Architectural Attacks

Abstract
Spectre and Meltdown are the names of side-channel attacks that were made public about a year ago. The attacks leak arbitrary data by utilizing modern processors' ability to perform speculative execution. In this seminar, I will give a high-level overview of the attacks—including a reminder on the necessary computer architecture background—and briefly mention some of the proposed mitigations. The seminar is intended for computer scientists who do not have a strong background in hardware and computer security, but who would like to stay up-to-date with what Spectre and Meltdown are all about. 

Bio
Elias Castegren is a post-doc at KTH, working with David Broman on developing tools for efficient and composable domain-specific languages. He received his PhD from Uppsala University, working with Tobias Wrigstad on type systems and language constructs for concurrent and parallel programming. Over the summer of 2018, Elias worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge for an internship with Matthew Parkinson on compiler-based Spectre mitigation. When he's not thinking about programming languages and compilers, Elias enjoys choir singing, piano playing, and bird watching.