When: May 13, 2025, 09:30 – 12:15

Where: VU Campus, Main building, room HG-10A20

Directions to Main building: https://vusec.net/directions

This mini workshop features a strong line-up of leading systems security researchers from around the world. The event is freely accessible to everyone on a first come, first serve basis.

Speakers

Workshop program (May 13 at VU, HG-10A20)

09:30	Coffee and tea
09:55	Opening by Cristiano Giuffrida (AMSec)
10:00	Speaker: Stefan Brunthaler Title: HOBBIT - Hashed OBject-Based Object InTegrity Abstract: C vulnerabilities usually hold verbatim for C++ programs. The counterfeit-object-oriented programming attack (COOP) demonstrated that this relation is asymmetric, i.e., it only applies to C++. The problem pinpointed by this COOP attack is that C++ does not validate the integrity of its objects. By injecting malicious objects with manipulated virtual function table pointers, attackers can hijack control-flow of programs. The software security community addressed the COOP-problem in the years following its discovery, but together with the emergence of transient-execution attacks, such as Spectre, researchers also shifted their attention. Based on joint work with PhD student Matthias Bernad, I will present HOBBIT, a software-only solution to prevent COOP attacks by validating object integrity for virtual function pointer tables. HOBBIT does not require any hardware specific features, scales to multi-million lines of C++ source code, and our LLVM-based implementation offers a configurable performance impact between 121.63% and 2.80% on compute-intensive SPEC CPU C++ benchmarks. HOBBIT’s security analysis indicates strong resistance to brute forcing attacks and demonstrates additional benefits of using execute-only memory. Bio: Since 2017 Stefan Brunthaler holds the Chair for Secure Software Engineering at the CODE National Research Institute for Cyber Defense at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. There he directs the Munich Computer Systems Research Laboratory, μCSRL for short, which focuses on fundamental research in the intersection of programming languages and security, including among other topics large-scale automated software diversity, datacenter-scale fuzzing, trustworthy compilation and decompilation. At μCSRL we explore how these techniques can be applied to secure both traditional software systems and software supply chains. Stefan received a Dr.techn. degree from TU Wien, was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Irvine, a tenured associate professor for compilers and programming languages at Paderborn University, and is a member of IFIP Working Group 2.4 "Software Implementation Technology". By way of adopting Stefan's interpreter optimization techniques for the Python programming language, his research is used by millions of people on a daily basis.
10:45	Speaker: Haiyu Mao Title: From Microarchitectures to Systems: Designing Holistic Data-Centric Architectures for Real Applications Abstract: As data-intensive applications, such as large language models that enhance convenience in daily life and bioinformatics applications that drive advancements in healthcare, become increasingly important, they require immense data processing capabilities. However, running these applications on current von Neumann architectures results in significant data movement between processors (CPU, GPU) and memory. This not only leads to high latency but also consumes a large amount of energy. Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures offer a promising solution to this problem by either integrating processing units closer to memory (processing near memory) or enabling memory units to directly process data (processing using memory). Despite the potential of PIM, most research efforts have focused on accelerating memory-intensive operators within applications, leaving the challenge of supporting real-world applications with PIM architectures largely unaddressed. This talk explores how to efficiently leverage PIM for real applications by designing holistic data-centric architectures. The talk will begin with an overview of recent advancements in PIM and the challenges associated with its adoption for practical applications. It will then introduce two projects that propose innovative data-centric architecture and system designs: the first project focuses on in-memory acceleration of nanopore genome analysis by tightly integrating basecalling and read mapping, and the second explores exploiting dynamic parallelism in large language model decoding with a PIM-enabled computing system. Finally, the talk will conclude with a discussion of future research directions in adopting PIM for real applications. Bio: Dr. Haiyu Mao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London. Prior to this, she served as a postdoctoral researcher in the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, under the leadership of Prof. Onur Mutlu, beginning in September 2020. Dr. Mao earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in July 2020, where she conducted research under the supervision of Prof. Jiwu Shu. Her research interests span a range of areas, including computer architecture, processing-in-memory/storage, machine learning acceleration, bioinformatics, non-volatile memory, and secure memory.
11:30	Speaker: Marius Muench Title: SIMurai: Slicing Through the Complexity of SIM Card Security Research Abstract: SIM cards: the root of trust in modern cellular networks. Phones, cars, trains, payment terminals, 5G routers, smart devices - chances are that they use a SIM to connect to the internet via mobile networks. In this talk, we will show that SIMs are more than passive storage devices containing secrets. We will discuss their inner workings and introduce SIMurai, our open-source software platform for security-focused SIM exploration and experimentation. Then, the talk will dive into the threats posed by hostile SIM cards, including deployment of Spyware or attacking a phone's baseband processor. We will also detail SIMurai's role in discovering high-impact vulnerabilities, affecting millions of devices. Last, the talk discusses how rogue carriers and attackers with physical access can trigger these vulnerabilities with ease, emphasizing the need to recognize hostile SIMs in cellular security threat models. Bio: Marius Muench is an assistant professor at the University of Birmingham. His research interests cover (in-)security of embedded systems, cellular security, and binary & microarchitectural exploitation. He obtained his PhD from Sorbonne University in cooperation with EURECOM and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He developed and maintains avatar2, a framework for analyzing embedded systems firmware, and FirmWire, an emulation and fuzzing platform for cellular basebands. Throughout his career, Marius publicly shared his findings and presented at venues such as Black Hat, REcon, and Hardwear.io.
12:15	Closing remarks