Getting Hammered: The Bleak Future of Rowhammer Research
Herbert Bos
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Within a short time, the Rowhammer vulnerability has gone from weird curiosity to serious threat in every nook and cranny of our digital infrastructure. In this talk, I will discuss some of the developments, mostly by means of the projects in which our group was involved. Although the research was exciting, I will argue that the way we conduct security research on hardware is broken. The problem is that the interests of hardware manufacturers and academics do not align and this is bad for everyone.
Bio: Herbert Bos is professor of Systems and Network Security at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he co-leads the VUSec research group. He obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University Computer Laboratory (UK). Coming from a systems background, he drifted into security a few years ago and never left. His research interests cover all aspects of system-level security and reliability, including topics such as software hardening, exploitation, micro-architectural attacks, binary analysis, fuzzing, side channels, and reverse engineering. He is very proud of his (former) students who are much cleverer than he is.