SHARD: Bridging the Gap Between Software and Hardware Security

In today’s age, designing and implementing secure systems (such as mobile phones, IoT devices, wearable devices, smart cars) is becoming increasingly important as it is not only critical for the safekeeping of users’ digital information, but also human lives are being put more and more at risk by the use of these innovative technologies, such as pacemakers.

The recent discovery of the ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ vulnerabilities taught us that much work still needs to be done at both hardware and software level in order to produce secure systems. It is important to not only be able to understand how to secure communication at processor (i.e. hardware) level, but also, devise smart mechanisms at the software level to detect intrusions. Similarly, the series of ‘Rowhammer’ attacks on desktop and smartphone platforms further consolidate our motivation and argument for the need to further research in this area.

To tackle the problem, we propose to bring together (academic and industry) researchers from the areas of systems security, side-channel attacks and countermeasures, secure hardware implementation and secure software implementation. The goal of the workshop is identify the gaps in existing systems implementation and work on what the next-generation of secure systems should look like.