[pl-seminar] Fwd: Broad Colloquium Today 4pm 1240 CS

["Loris D'Antoni" <loris@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Our very own Mark Hill is giving an interesting talk at 4 pm in CS1240 on Meltdown and Spectre.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark D. Hill <markhill@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 6:44 AM
Subject: Broad Colloquium Today 4pm 1240 CS
To: faculty@xxxxxxxxxxx <faculty@xxxxxxxxxxx>

FYI: This talk seeks to be a a department-wide colloquium that are too rare in our department IMHO. I gave it with good review to Google Maps, which is far from architecture. It show how correct-to-the-specification hardware still leaks information.Â

I hope that you and yours can consider attending.

âMark

Today's Events:

Implications of the Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Security Flaws [1]
Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
1240 CS
Mark D. Hill
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract: Two major hardware security design flaws--dubbed Meltdown and
Spectre--were broadly revealed to the public in early January 2018 in
research papers and blog posts that require considerable expertise and effort
to understand. To complement these, this talk seeks to give a general
computer science audience the gist of these security flaws and their
implications. The goal is to enable the audience can either stop there or
have a framework to learn more. A non-goal is exploring many details of flaw
exploitation and patch status, in part, because the speaker is a computer
architect, not a security expert.

In particular, this talk reviews that Computer Architecture 1.0 (the version
number is new) specifies the timing-independent functional behavior of a
computer and micro-architecture that is the set of implementation techniques
that improve performance by more than 100x. It then asks, âWhat if a
computer that is completely correct by Architecture 1.0 can be made to leak
protected information via timing, a.k.a., micro-architecture?â The answer
is that this exactly what is done by the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws.
Meltdown leaks kernel memory, but software & hardware fixes exist. Spectre
leaks memory outside of sandboxes and bounds check, and it is scary. An
implication is that the definition of Architecture 1.0--the most important
interface between software and hardware--is inadequate to protect
information. It is time for experts from multiple viewpoints to come together
to create Architecture 2.0).

Bio: Mark D. Hill (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill [2]) is John P. Morgridge
Professor and Gene M. Amdahl Professor of Computer Sciences at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. Hill has a PhD in computer science from the University
of California, Berkeley. Hillâs research targets computer design and
evaluation. He has made contributions to parallel computer system design
(e.g., memory consistency models and cache coherence), memory system design
(caches and translation buffers), computer simulation (parallel systems and
memory systems), software (e.g., page tables and cache-conscious
optimizations), deterministic replay and transactional memory. For example,
he is the inventor of the widely-used 3C model of cache behavior (compulsory,
capacity, and conflict misses) and co-inventor of the cornerstone for the C++
and Java multi-threaded memory specifications (sequential consistency for
data-race-free programs). He is a fellow of IEEE and the ACM. He serves as
Chair of the Computer Community Consortium (2018-20) and served as Wisconsin
Computer Sciences Department Chair 2014-2017.

Mark D. Hill,Âhttp://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill
John P. Morgridge Prof. andÂGene M. Amdahl Prof. of CSÂ
Computer Sciences Department,ÂUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
Chair, Computing CommunityÂConsortium,Âhttp://cra.org/ccc/