Course Schedule, Reading List, and Slides

Fall 2025

Course Schedule (Tentative)

Please find the paper-discussion sign-up sheet on Canvas, under the “Home” tab

(L) = Lecture given by the instructor
(D) = Paper discussion led by student presenters

Date Theme Topic Readings Slides
Week 1 Aug 25 Bootstrap (L) Course Logistics Please fill this anonymous course-preparation survey after the first class and before Aug 28 (Thu) Slides
Aug 27 (L) Topic Overview and Project Ideas - Slides
Week 2 Sep 1 Labor Day
Sep 3 uArch
Side
Channels		 (L) Cache-Based Side Channels (w/ Demo!) PoC
Week 3 Sep 8 (L) Side Channels in Public Clouds (w/ Demo!)
  • Pre-lecture: Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds (CCS '09)
  • Post-lecture: Everywhere All at Once: Co-Location Attacks on Public Cloud FaaS (ASPLOS '24)
Sep 10 (L) Detection, Partitioning and Randomization
  • Pre-lecture: CATalyst: Defeating Last-Level Cache Side Channel Attacks in Cloud Computing (HPCA '16)
  • No post-lecture reading, please focus on your term project proposal
Week 4 Sep 15 (L) Data-Oblivious Computation
  • Pre-lecture: (Intel) Data Operand Independent Timing Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Guidance
  • Post-lecture: Data Oblivious ISA Extensions for Side Channel-Resistant and High Performance Computing (NDSS '19)
Sep 17 Speculation (L) Spectre and Meltdown (w/ Demo!)
  • Pre-lecture: Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution
  • No post-lecture reading
Week 5 Sep 22 (D) Advanced Spectre Attacks Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
Sep 24 (D) Hardware Defenses Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
Week 6 Sep 29 Trusted
Execution
Environments
(TEEs)		 (L) Overview and Background
  • Pre-lecture: Trusted Execution Environments: Properties, Applications, and Challenges
  • Post-lecture: Intel SGX Explained (Chapters 1--3)
Oct 1 (L) Memory Encryption and Authentication
  • Pre-lecture: Efficient Memory Integrity Verification and Encryption for Secure Processors
  • Post-lecture: Using Address Independent Seed Encryption and Bonsai Merkle Trees to Make Secure Processors OS- and Performance-Friendly
Week 7 Oct 6 (L) TEE Designs
  • Pre-lecture: Keystone: An Open Framework for Architecting Trusted Execution Environments
Oct 8 (D) Attacks on TEEs Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Controlled-Channel Attacks: Deterministic Side Channels for Untrusted Operating Systems
  • MicroScope: Enabling Microarchitectural Replay Attacks
Week 8 Oct 13 Isolation &
Memory
Safety		 (L) OS and VM Isolation
  • Post-lecture: Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications
Oct 15 (L) Memory Safety & Control-Flow Integrity
  • Pre-lecture: An Introduction to CHERI
  • Post-lecture: No-FAT: Architectural Support for Low Overhead Memory Safety Checks
Week 9 Oct 20 (D) In-Process Isolation Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Donky: Domain Keys--Efficient In-Process Isolation for RISC-V and x86
  • Going beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible and Secure Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI
Oct 22 (D) Transient Execution + Memory Safety Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Speculative Probing: Hacking Blind in the Spectre Era
  • PACMAN: Attacking ARM Pointer Authentication with Speculative Execution
Week 10 Oct 27 RowHammer (L) RowHammer
Oct 29 Inspiring
Papers/Ideas		 (D) Attacking AI Systems Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
Week 11 Nov 3 (D) Emerging TEE Designs Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Graviton: Trusted Execution Environments on GPUs
  • Sequestered Encryption: A Hardware Technique for Comprehensive Data Privacy
Nov 5 (D) uArch Weird Machines Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Computing with Time: Microarchitectural Weird Machines
  • The Gates of Time: Improving Cache Attacks with Transient Execution
Week 12 Nov 10 (L) Information-Flow Tracking in Hardware Paper to discuss:
  • Complete Information Flow Tracking from the Gates Up
  • Speculative Privacy Tracking (SPT): Leaking Information From Speculative Execution Without Compromising Privacy
Nov 12 (D) Fun Side Channels Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86
  • Pentimento: Data Remanence in Cloud FPGAs
Week 13 Nov 17 (D) Attacks on GPU Paper to discuss:
  • BarraCUDA: Edge GPUs do Leak DNN Weights
  • GPU.zip: On the Side-Channel Implications of Hardware-Based Graphical Data Compression
Nov 19 (D) SW & HW Fuzzing Papers to discuss (Choose one to review):
  • SpecFuzz: Bringing Spectre-Type Vulnerabilities to the Surface
  • Cascade: CPU Fuzzing via Intricate Program Generation
(Optional) Videos on hardware fuzzing:
Week 14 Fall Break (Optional Reading: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker)
Week 15 Dec 1 Summary Reflect and Chat* - -
Dec 3 Project Final Presentation (1) - -
W16 Dec 8 Final Presentation (2) - -

* With free food!