Secure Multicore and Accelerator Architectures (supported by National Science Foundation, NXP Semiconductors, Connecticut Cybersecurity Center (C^3)): Computer systems have recently seen a rise of malicious exploits, such as Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow attacks on commercial processors. Traditionally, the memory and performance requirements of an application have been dealt with using explicit hardware resources, resulting in minimal sharing of resources leading to strong isolation among applications. However, with sensors-to-decision problems executing concurrently on emerging multicore and GPU machines, the memory and many other computational resources must be organized as shared resources. One of the caveat in such a system is security, where indirect attacks, such as unsafe access to memory mapped data, or information leakage across the shared software and hardware channels can lead to insecure computing substrates. This research aims to address these challenges by devising methods to secure such systems while meeting the efficiency and responsiveness expectations of the system.
Resilient Multicore Architectures (supported by National Science Foundation, NXP Semiconductors, UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering): Today’s designs are being shaped by the challenges of nanoscale technologies: increased power consumption, and escalating occurance of hardware faults at runtime severly hamper the functionality and performance guarantees of future computer systems. The focus of this reseaerch is on building high performance architectural mechanisms and protocols that exploit application through hardware layers to co-optimize system resiliency and efficiency.