Title:
Finding and Fixing Security Gaps Between Hardware and Software
Abstract:
Computing systems rely on abstractions that allow hardware and software to be designed and understood separately. These abstractions make complex systems manageable, but they can also conceal behavior that matters to security. A feature intended to simplify debugging can create an unexpected attack path, while a mechanism intended to isolate software can make that software difficult to test.
This talk examines how we identify and address security gaps at the boundary between hardware and software. Drawing on research in embedded and architectural security, I will discuss how hardware features can undermine software protections and also provide new ways to observe execution and discover vulnerabilities. These examples motivate emerging work on automated repair of hardware designs and firmware, raising fundamental questions about what a repair must preserve and what evidence supports its correctness.
Throughout the talk, I will emphasize the reasoning that turns these problems into research directions, from questioning an accepted assumption to designing an experiment and interpreting the limits of its results. The goal is to connect attack discovery, systematic testing, and repair through a common question: how can we make security claims precise enough to test and use the resulting evidence to build more dependable systems?
Speaker:
Dean Sullivan
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Hampshire
Bio:
Dean Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. His research spans computer architecture, systems security, and embedded computing, with an emphasis on understanding and addressing vulnerabilities that arise from interactions between hardware and software. His work includes architectural attacks and defenses, hardware-assisted software testing, and automated repair of hardware designs and firmware. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in 2021, and his M.S. in Computer Engineering and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida. His work has received Best Paper Awards at the Design Automation Conference in 2015 and IEEE AsianHOST in 2023, and a Distinguished Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2022.
Host: Professor John McNeill