Industry Expert Blogs

This is the second post about Eli Singerman's keynote at the recent Jasper User Group. The first was Formally Verifying Processor Security. In the last couple of years, high-performance processors (not just Intel's) have been shown to be vulnerable to various side-channel attacks. These typically rely on using speculative execution to run code that should not be run, and then, despite the speculative execution being abandoned, some leak of data occurs. The first two such attacks were announced to the public at the start of last year with the names Spectre and Meltdown.

Eli is working on using formal approaches to prove that a future processor is immune to side-channel attacks, and also for analyzing the effects of mitigation on current processors (going back seven years). This is not just hardware that needs to be analyzed, but core firmware (in the processor itself) and other firmware (in devices like cameras and accelerators).

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