Research
The Spark lab's mission is to build secure systems through
novel architectures with help from operating systems and compilers.
Security work today is spread across the entire stack as well as across
mobile devices and cloud servers. Increasingly sensitive programs will
shortly run on shiny new hardware
that promise to beat Dennard-scaling hurdles but have never met a
threat model. All to say, this is a good time for computer architects and systems researchers to
jump in.
Spark lab's current projects build a new security-plane for distributed
applications. Our projects include building a new instruction-set (ISA) and micro-architecture
that translates program-layer security properties into hardware implementations,
and a container-orchestrator and compiler that maps distributed web- and micro-services
on to our security-ISA. For example, one series of work has been to build
hardware boxes that do not leak information, and then use this to put data into boxes
instead of applications.
One near-term outcome of our research is to put users
back in control of their own data, even if their data is computed on by
untrusted applications and infrastructure.
In the long term, we'll be on Mars and leave all non-secure
computers here.
Awards
- Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security, HSTTC 2021
- Best Paper Nominee, HOST 2019
- Qualcomm Faculty Award, 2018
- Finalist, CSAW Applied Research Competition, 2018
- Best Paper Runner-Up, HOST 2018
- AMD Chair, Department of ECE, UT Austin, 2017-19
- Qualcomm Faculty Award, 2017
- Best Paper Award, ASPLOS 2015
- NSF Career Award, January 2015
- IEEE Micro Top Pick, Honorable Mention, January-February 2015
- Google Faculty Research Award, 2013-14
- Top 10 shortlist for NYU-Poly Best Applied Security Paper Award, 2013.
Publications
-
DSN'22
Back to the future: N-Versioning of Microservices Antonio M. Espinoza, Riley Wood, Stephanie Forrest, Mohit Tiwari in Proceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), June 2022, Baltimore, MD, USA. -
IJCAI/ECAI'22
Using Constraint Programming and Graph Representation Learning for Generating Interpretable Cloud Security Policies Mikhail Kazdagli, Mohit Tiwari, Akshat Kumar in Proceedings of the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), July 2022, Messe Wien, Vienna, Austria. -
HOST'21
Morpheus II: A RISC-V Security Extension for Protecting Vulnerable Software and Hardware Austin Harris, Tarunesh Verma, Shijia Wei, Alex Kisil, Misiker Tadesse Aga, Valeria Bertacco, Baris Kasikci, Mohit Tiwari, Todd Austin, in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), December 2021, Washington D.C., USA. -
ESEC/FSE'21
ACHyb: A Hybrid Analysis Approach to Detect Kernel Access Control Vulnerabilities Yang Hu, Wenxi Wang, Casen Hunger, Riley Wood, Sarfraz Khurshid, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), August 2021, Athens, Greece. -
MICRO'19
Cyclone: Detecting Contention-Based Cache Information Leaks Through Cyclic Interference. Austin Harris*, Shijia Wei*, Prateek Sahu, Pranav Kumar, Todd Austin, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 52nd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2019, Columbus, OH. -
HOST'19
Using Power-Anomalies to Counter Evasive Micro-Architectural Attacks in Embedded Systems. Shijia Wei, Aydin Aysu, Michael Orshansky, Andreas Gerstlauer, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), May 2019, Tysons Corner, USA. (Best Paper Candidate) -
ASPLOS'19
Morpheus: A Vulnerability-Tolerant Secure Architecture Based on Ensembles of Moving Target Defenses with Churn. Mark Gallagher, Lauren Biernacki, Shibo Chen, Zelalem Birhanu Aweke, Salessawi Ferede Yitbarek, Misiker Tadesse Aga, Austin Harris, Zhixing Xu, Baris Kasikci, Valeria Bertacco, Sharad Malik, Mohit Tiwari, Todd Austin, in Proceedings of Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2019. -
ASPLOS'19
Relaxed Hierarchical ORAM. Chandrasekhar Nagarajan, Ali Shafiee, Rajeev Balasubramonian, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2019. -
ASPLOS'18
DATS: Data Containers for Web Applications. Casen Hunger, Lluis Vilanova, Charalampos Papamanthou, Yoav Etsion, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2018, Williamsburg, VA. -
HOST'18
Horizontal Side-Channel Vulnerabilities of Post-Quantum Key Exchange Protocols. Aydin Aysu, Youssef Tobah, Mohit Tiwari, Andreas Gerstlauer, Michael Orshansky, in Proceedings of IEEE Internation Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), May 2018, Washington DC, USA. (Best Paper Runner-Up) -
PETS'18 CSAW Best Applied Security Paper, Finalist
Power to peep-all: Inference Attacks by Malicious Batteries on Mobile Devices. Pavel Lifshits, Roni Forte, Yedid Hoshen, Matthew Halpern, Manuel Philipose, Mohit Tiwari, Mark Silberstein in Journal of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium -
DATE'18
Binary Ring-LWE Hardware with Power Side-Channel Countermeasures. Aydin Aysu, Andreas Gerstlauer, Michael Orshansky, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), March 2018, Dresden, Germany. -
HPCA'18
Secure DIMM: Moving ORAM Primitives Closer to Memory. Ali Shafiee, Rajeev Balasubramonian, Mohit Tiwari, Feifei Li, in Proceedings of High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), February 2018, Vienna, Austria. -
MICRO'16
Quantifying and Improving the Efficiency of Hardware-based Mobile Malware Detectors. Mikhail Kazdagli, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 49th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), October 2016, Taipei, Taiwan. -
USENIX'16
Secure, Precise, and Fast Floating-Point Operations on x86 Processors. Ashay Rane, Calvin Lin, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 25th Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX), August 2016, Austin, TX. -
MICRO'15
Avoiding Information Leakage in the Memory Controller with Fixed Service Policies. Ali Shafiee, Akhila Gundu, Manjunath Shevgoor, Rajeev Balasubramonian, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 48th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), December 2015, Waikiki, Hawaii. -
USENIX'15
Raccoon: Closing Digital Side-Channels through Obfuscated Execution. Ashay Rane, Calvin Lin, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the 24th Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX), August 2015, Washington D.C. Short Summary. -
ASPLOS'15 Best Paper Award
GhostRider: A Hardware-Software System for Memory Trace Oblivious Computation. Chang Liu, Austin Harris, Martin Maas, Michael Hicks, Mohit Tiwari, Elaine Shi, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2015, Istanbul, Turkey. -
HPCA'15
Understanding Contention-driven Covert Channels and Using Them for Defense. Casen Hunger, Mikhail Kazdagli, Ankit Rawat, Alex Dimakis, Sriram Vishwanath, Mohit Tiwari, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), February 2015. -
ASPLOS'14 IEEE Micro Top Picks, Honorable Mention, January-February 2015.
Sapper: A Language for Hardware-Level Security Policy Enforcement. Xun Li, Vineeth Kashyap, Jason Oberg, Mohit Tiwari, Vasanth Rajarathinam, Ryan Kastner, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf, and Frederic Chong, in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2014, Salt Lake City. -
CCS'13 Shortlisted (top 10) for NYU-Poly AT&T Best Applied Security Paper Award, 2013
PHANTOM: Practical Oblivious Computation in a Secure Processor. Martin Maas, Eric Love, Emil Stefanov, Mohit Tiwari, Elaine Shi, Krste Asanovic, John Kubiatowicz, Dawn Song, in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2013, Berlin, Germany
Workshops
HASP'14
Morpheus: Benchmarking Computational Diversity in Mobile Malware. Mikhail Kazdagli, Ling Huang, Vijay Reddi, Mohit Tiwari in Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy, held in conjunction with ISCA, 2014HASP'14
Memory Bandwidth Reservation in the Cloud to Avoid Information Leakage in the Memory Controller. Akhila Gundu, Gita Sreekumar, Ali Shafiee, Seth Pugsley, Hardik Jain, Rajeev Balasubramonian, Mohit Tiwari, in Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HASP), held in conjunction with ISCA, 2014CARL'13
A High-Performance Oblivious RAM Controller on the Convey HC-2ex Heterogeneous Computing Platform. Martin Maas, Eric Love, Emil Stefanov, Mohit Tiwari, Elaine Shi, Krste Asanovic, John Kubiatowicz, Dawn Song, in Workshop on the Intersections of Computer Architecture and Reconfigurable Logic, 2013
Group Members
Mohit Tiwari
I enjoy building new hardware-software systems that enforce well-defined security properties. Before joining UT, I received my PhD in UC Santa Barbara in 2011, and then worked as a post-doc at UC Berkeley.
Austin Harris
I am interested in designing secure processors and accelerators and prototyping them on a FPGA.
Casen Hunger
I am interested in using machine learning and operating systems to build privacy-preserving systems.
Shijia Wei
I am interested in understanding tradeoffs between system performance and security and leveraging strengths from all layers towards a high-performance secure system.
Prateek Sahu
My research interests lie in the domains of computer architecture, microarchitecture and security. I am eager to learn more about how hardware and software can interact to guarantee better data privacy.
Willy Vasquez
I am interested in designing provably secure systems using cryptography and formal methods.
Yang Hu
My research interests lie in system security and software engineering.
Joseph Dean
I am interested in building network intrusion detection systems.
Yongye Zhu
My research interest lies on the intersection of computer architecture and cryptography and how to improve security using formal proofs.
Former Members
Ashay Rane
Phd 2019.
Next: Groq.
Mikhail Kazdagli
PhD 2018.
Next: Essential.
Rohith Prakash
MS 2018.
Next: Apple.
Aydin Aysu
Post-doc 2016-2018.
Next: Assistant Professor at NC State.
Pranav Kumar
MS 2019.
Next: Intel.
Riley Wood
MS 2020.
Next: Apple.
