What’s New: Intel announced the winners of its Intel Hardware Security Academic Award program aimed at fostering innovative research that enhances industry’s ability to deliver more secure and trustworthy technologies. The program is proud to recognize timely research that addresses fundamental security challenges. This year’s program recognized innovators who are helping secure the use of artificial intelligence, secure supply chains, and support confidential computing technologies, tools and capabilities.
"At Intel, we believe that the intersection of academic research and industry application is the crucible where the most advanced and resilient security features are forged. By supporting academia, we tap into a wellspring of cutting-edge knowledge and fresh perspectives that challenge conventional approaches. This synergy not only accelerates the development of innovative security solutions but also helps Intel deliver hardware security assurance services that are underpinned by the latest research advancements. It is a partnership that not only benefits Intel and the scholarly community but ultimately serves to protect the digital infrastructure upon which our society is increasingly reliant."
About the Award Program: Intel initiated the Hardware Security Academic Award program in 2021 as part of Intel’s commitment to collaborate with and foster advancements in the security research community. The award program invites academic researchers to submit a recently published paper demonstrating novel research with a meaningful impact on the hardware security ecosystem, including but not limited to Intel’s own products. The award program also issues a Test of Time award to honor papers published more than ten years ago that have demonstrated a significant and lasting impact in the security field.
For researchers who are interested in submitting a paper for next year’s program, the submission window will be announced on the program page.
About the Selection Process: A committee at Intel examined the viability, novelty, originality, and relevance of all submissions with a focus on demonstrating significant contribution to and impact on the hardware security industry. This year’s applicants included 60 papers featuring more than 240 authors from academic and industry backgrounds, across 17 countries.
Anand Rajan, senior director, Emerging Security Lab at Intel Labs, presented this year’s awards during a reception in Philadelphia, PA coinciding with the USENIX Security Symposium.
Test of Time Award Winner: “Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization”
Originally published in 2008 at the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), this influential paper introduced a novel scheme for securely hosting mutually distrusting code on the same platform and has garnered nearly 1,000 citations to date. This approach marked a significant departure from the traditional hierarchical view of system security, offering a novel on-demand, isolated execution scheme that ensures end-to-end secure communication even in untrustworthy environments. By minimizing the Trusted Computing Base (TCB), Flicker provides a robust solution for secure code execution in diverse and potentially hostile settings. The paper's pioneering work has had lasting impact in the security field, influencing subsequent research work and practical applications that led to the confidential computing era.
The winning team included:
- Jonathan McCune, Google
- Bryan Parno, Carnegie Mellon University
- Adrian Perrig, ETH Zurich
- Michael Reiter, Duke University
- Hiroshi Isozaki, University of Tsukuba
Recent Publication Winner: “There’s Always a Bigger Fish: A Clarifying Analysis of a Machine-Learning-Assisted Side-Channel Attack”
This paper highlights the possibility of misinterpreting machine learning assisted side channel attacks that lead to incorrect conclusions regarding the root cause. Without proper attribution, mitigations and countermeasures may be incomplete. Their use of machine-learning experiments to rule out the cache-occupancy hypothesis appears to be a promising method to analyze sources of leakage in other side-channel attacks.
The winning team included:
- Jack Cook, University of Oxford
- Jules Drean, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL
- Jonathan Behrens, Microsoft
- Mengjia Yan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL
Recent Publication Honorable Mention: “Branch History Injection: On the Effectiveness of Hardware Mitigations Against Cross-Privilege Spectre-v2 Attacks”
This research introduces Branch History Injection (BHI), a new primitive to build cross-privilege BHI attacks on systems that deploy isolation-based hardware defenses. The paper presents a BHI attack which circumvents hardware mitigations through branch history manipulation by an unprivileged attacker. The paper motivates the need for enumeration and deployment of new software and hardware mitigations.
The winning team included:
- Enrico Barberis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Pietro Frigo, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Marius Muench, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Herbert Bos, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Cristiano Giuffrida, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Recent Publication Honorable Mention: “Going beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible and Secure Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI”
This research describes Hardware-assisted, in-process Fault Isolation (HFI) to deliver the best features of software and hardware-based isolation. Designed with practical adoption in mind, HFI introduces regions flexible enough to integrate with existing Software Fault Isolation (SFI) systems (e.g., Wasm) and supports in-process isolation of existing native binaries—while being simple enough to fit within the data and control path of existing processors.
The winning team included:
- Shravan Narayan, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
- Tal Garfinkel, University of California at San Diego
- Mohammadkazem Taram, Purdue University
- Joey Rudek, University of California at San Diego
- Daniel Moghimi, Google
- Evan Johnson, University of California at San Diego
- Chris Fallin, Fastly
- Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Intel Labs
- Michael LeMay, Intel Labs
- Ravi Sahita, Rivos
- Dean Tullsen, University of California at San Diego
- Deian Stefan, University of California at San Diego
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better. To learn more about Intel’s innovations, go to newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. No product or component can be absolutely secure