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https://zoom.us/j/99457028566?pwd=bGllck5vS05iYnhtMGVCUzFGS1JqUT09

Meeting ID: 994 5702 8566
Passcode: 780865

Abstract:
Microarchitectural security is one of the most challenging and exciting problems in system security today. With the discovery of transient execution attacks, it has become clear that microarchitectural attacks have significant impact on the security properties of software running on a processor that runs code from various stakeholders (such as, for instance, in the cloud). This talk will first provide an overview of the current understanding of microarchitectural security, with a focus on how the research community has built formal models for processors that support proving that software is resilient to specific classes of microarchitectural attacks. Next, we turn to the problem of validating these proposed formal models: how can we convince ourselves and others that a given formal model is an adequate model for a given real-world processor, and that we can justifiably trust the security properties proven based on the model. This is an instance of the more general problem of empirically validating whether a real-world system satisfies the assumptions on which a formal model relies. We will discuss a small case study where we empirically validated a formally proven security property of a simple processor by systematically attacking the corresponding real-world implementation of the processor. We end with some conclusions and reflections on how our experiences from this case study might help us build more adequate formal models.

Bio:
Frank Piessens is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research field is software and system security, where he focuses on the development of high-assurance techniques to deal with implementation-level software vulnerabilities and bugs, including techniques such as software verification, run-time monitoring, hardware security architectures, type systems and programming language design. He has served on the program committee of numerous security and software conferences including ACM CCS, Usenix Security, IEEE Security & Privacy, and ACM POPL. He acted as program chair for the International symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSOS 2014 & 2015), for the International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (POST 2016) and for the IEEE European Symposium on Security & Privacy (Euro S&P 2018 & 2019).

https://cispa-de.zoom.us/j/96816918090?pwd=S1BONE9XY0dUbUxNc0gyYnFpajE3Zz09
Meeting ID: 968 1691 8090
Passcode: #iU456

We encourage everyone on campus to attend the presentation. Should you want to meet with Franzi virtually as well, please shoot me an email and I'll try to arrange a meeting. Note also that Franzi gave a similar talk at MPI-SWS last fall, yet this presentation features updated new results throughout.

Abstract:
People who use modern technologies are inundated with content and information from many sources, including advertisements on the web, posts on social media, and (looking to the future) content in augmented or virtual reality. While these technologies are transforming our lives and communications in many positive ways, they also come with serious risks to users' security, privacy, and the trustworthiness of content they see: the online advertising ecosystem tracks individual users and may serve misleading or deceptive ads, social media feeds are full of potential mis/disinformation, and emerging augmented reality technologies can directly modify users' perceptions of the physical world in undesirable ways. In this talk, I will discuss several lines of research from our lab that explore these issues from a broad computer security and privacy perspective, leveraging methodologies ranging from qualitative user studies to systematic measurement studies to system design and evalua!
tion. What unites these efforts is a key question: what can (or do) users believe about the content they receive through our existing and emerging technologies, and how can we design platforms and ecosystems more robust to these risks?

Bio:
Franziska (Franzi) Roesner is an Associate Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she co-directs the Security and Privacy Research Lab. Her research focuses broadly on computer security and privacy for end users of existing and emerging technologies. Her work has studied topics including online tracking and advertising, security and privacy for sensitive user groups, security and privacy in emerging augmented reality (AR) and IoT platforms, and online mis/disinformation. She is the recipient of an MIT Technology Review "Innovators Under 35" Award, an Emerging Leader Alumni Award from the University of Texas at Austin, a Google Security and Privacy Research Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. She serves on the USENIX Security and USENIX Enigma Steering Committees. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2014 and her BS from UT Austin in 2008. Her website is at https://www.franziroesner.com.

Abstract: Designing encoding and decoding circuits to reliably send messages over many uses of a noisy channel is a central problem in communication theory. When studying the optimal transmission rates achievable with asymptotically vanishing error it is usually assumed that these circuits can be implemented using noise-free gates. While this assumption is satisfied for classical machines in many scenarios, it is not expected to be satisfied in the near term future for quantum machines where decoherence leads to faults in the quantum gates. As a result, fundamental questions regarding the practical relevance of quantum channel coding remain open. By combining techniques from fault-tolerant quantum computation with techniques from quantum communication, we initiate the study of these questions. As our main result, we prove threshold theorems for quantum communication, i.e. we show that coding near the (standard noiseless) classical or quantum capacity is possible when the gate error is below a threshold.

Zoom https://zoom.us/j/94577321297?pwd=N3l5K1ZtZ3E1aytnWlBkL1FUazNXZz09
Meeting ID 945 7732 1297
Passcode 205903

Hosts: Ignacio Cirac (MPQ) and Kurt Mehlhorn (MPI-INF)