Room 206 (2nd floor, badged access)
17 December 2026 - 02h00
How increasing complexity of processors make micro-architectural attacker’s life harder
by Guillaume Didier from Université de la Sarre
invited by David MONNIAUX
17 December 2026 - 02h00
How increasing complexity of processors make micro-architectural attacker’s life harder
by Guillaume Didier from Université de la Sarre
invited by David MONNIAUX
Abstract: Before one can build secure micro-architectures, one must first understand current architectures vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern computing system keeps increasing, with limited documentation.
As such, reverse engineering modern processors is an absolute requirement for security research. Furthermore reverse engineering is built on micro-architectural attack primitives.
In this talk I will show how the increasing complexity of the cache hierarchy makes cache attack less reliable, and how I contributed methods to regain reliability.
I will also touch on a few other areas of complexity and reverse engineering.
