Time Well Spent: Fresh ideas for hardening code against side-channel attacks

This meeting is organized as an on-site event only.

Time Well Spent:
Fresh ideas for hardening code against side-channel attacks.

To thwart classic timing side-channel attacks, real-world cryptographic software executes critical code in constant time. As constant time execution is expensive, identifying critical code sections is crucial for safe and performant applications. In light of the vast amount of possible program states, providing strong guarantees is infeasible. While elaborate state-of-the-art techniques provide strong security guarantees, they still face the limitations of modern program analysis and hence cannot provide formal guarantees. This talk explains the threat of timing-based side-channels and discusses existing and (potential) future solutions under investigation.

Speaker & Details:
Manuel Wiesinger (security researcher at VUSec Systems Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Talk language: English
On-site event only!

About the Speaker:
*********************
Manuel Wiesinger is a PhD student at the VUSec Systems Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests are software security, operating systems and hardware vulnerabilities (RowHammer, Tran‑ sient execution attacks).
He is experienced in system programming, Linux kernel development and system administration.

Agenda
*********
18:00: Gathering at SBA Research (5th floor)
18:05: Short introduction and overview
18:10: Talk
18:50: Q&A
19:10: Drinks and snacks

Looking forward to see you!