Security Research: Technical Paper Round-Up


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at recent conferences, including the August 2022 USENIX Security Symposium and IEEE’s International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses (including on-chip mesh interconnect attacks), heterogeneous attacks on cache hierarchies, rowhammer attacks and mitig... » read more

Side-Channel Attack “Binoculars” Exploits Interactions Between HW Page Walk Operations & Other Memory Operations


New technical paper titled "Binoculars: Contention-Based Side-Channel Attacks Exploiting the Page Walker" was presented by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Tel Aviv University at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022. Abstract: "Microarchitectural side channels are a pressing security threat. These channels are created when programs modulate hardw... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 31


Three-valued memory Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo developed a new three-valued memory device inspired by solid lithium-ion batteries which could potentially serve as low power consumption RAM. The new device consisted of a stack of three solid layers made of lithium, lithium phosphate, and gold. This stack is essentially a miniature low-capacity... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 13


Keeping tabs on crops University of Missouri researchers collaborated with the Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture on pairing a regular digital camera with a miniature infrared camera for a novel system providing temperature data and detailed images of crops. “Using an infrared camera to monitor crop temperature can be tricky because it is difficult to diff... » read more