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 Fri, 15. May. 2020   Surminski, Sebastian

DFG-Project RAINCOAT started

In order to maintain the increasing chip performance while simultaneously advancing miniaturization, manufactures of modern memory- and processing units are increasingly relying on highly optimized, parallelized microarchitectures. With recent microarchitectural attacks like Rowhammer, Spectre and Meltown, it has been demonstrated, that such optimizations may cause unforeseen security risks. With the introduction of novel nano-technology, this trend towards miniaturization of hardware components will continue. The aim of the project is to investigate the security-relevant implications of new technology building blocks, such as NRAM, and to develop countermeasures for possible attack vectors. At the same time, existing security gaps, induced e.g. by branch predictors, are to be closed. Such measures must not cancel out the performance advantage of the new technologies. Therefore, the special focus lies on randomization-based countermeasures. These methods have already proven to be particularly suitable in the area of runtime attacks (e.g., buffer overflows).