Securing the Systems of the Future - Techniques for a Shifting Attack Space

Panel Overview Known security vulnerabilities across the computing stack have caused significant concern, even requiring extensive countermeasures and system patches to address. As an example, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, which were disclosed in January 2018, exploit architectural and circuit vulnerabilities to allow a malicious process access to secrets stored in the memory of another running program. Although software-based patches were distributed, true hardware solutions are only available through replacement. With such high costs to protect data and patch systems after the fact, the question of securing against an unknown attack space becomes even more critical. The panel aims to address this critical issue, while introducing related considerations including 1) protecting resource constrained systems, 2) countermeasures against multifaceted attacks in the context of an unknown future vulnerability, and 3) trade-offs in circuit and system design to protect critical data and functions.