Intel Hardware Security Academic Award
Rewarding Outstanding Innovation
The Intel Hardware Security Academic Award recognizes advancements in solutions, tools, and methodologies, which enhance the industry’s ability to deliver more secure and trustworthy foundational technologies. Launched in 2021, the program awards published papers that contain outstanding novel research with a meaningful impact on the hardware security ecosystem and industry, including technologies created by Intel.
The program also awards a Test of Time honor for research published more than 10 years ago that has demonstrated a significant and lasting impact in the security field.
Research Focus Areas
While we welcome all recently published papers demonstrating innovative research that advances product security in architecture, design, development, and validation, we highly encourage research in the following focus areas:
- Use of AI to accelerate or enhance security and security developed to protect AI technologies from a hardware standpoint.
- Use of analytics and machine learning to improve product security capabilities and robustness.
- Groundbreaking advancements in foundational security capabilities, including next-generation cryptographic techniques, safety-critical systems verification, and resilience against adversarial behavior.
- Innovations in scalable, automated tools and methodologies for hardware design and verification that are effective in addressing common security weaknesses, significantly improving product quality and assurance efficiency.
- Emerging usages, threat analysis, systemic mitigations, and security enhancements that strengthen cloud-to-edge computing, accelerant, and communication solutions.
- Architectural, micro-architecture, and circuit innovations that improve resiliency and reliability of silicon and electronics against transient faults.
- Innovations in Confidential Manufacturing methodologies, tools, and capabilities to support Intel’s IDM 2.0 vision, offering assurance, transparency, and a trusted supply chain to the ecosystem.
2024 Award Winners
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.
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.