How Hardware Helps and Hurts Software Security
Computer games should not be able to learn sensitive data from banking apps – even when they run on the same processor. Also, a vulnerability in a single application should not compromise the security of an entire system. Ensuring strong isolation between software components is fundamental to modern system architectures, from IoT and mobile devices to large-scale cloud services.
In recent years, hardware has made significant strides in supporting isolation of different security contexts. At the same time, advances in side-channel attacks have shown that even strong isolation mechanisms can be undermined through physical, microarchitectural, and software-level effects. This talk explores selected recent research on how hardware mechanisms can strengthen software isolation and how side-channel attacks, at the same time, can erode such boundaries.
Speaker Biography
Prof. Stefan Mangard is the head of the Institute of Information Security at Graz University of Technology. His research focuses on hardware security – from physical side channels to the design of secure system architectures. He has authored around 150 peer-reviewed publications and a widely cited textbook on power analysis attacks. Prof. Mangard received an ERC Consolidator Grant for his work on securing processors against physical attacks. He holds MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from Graz University of Technology. Before his academic career, he worked as a security architect at Infineon Technologies, where he contributed to the design of secure smart card platforms.
