Research
Publications
Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution
Hosein Yavarzadeh, Mohammadkazem Taram, Shravan Narayan, Deian Stefan, Dean Tullsen
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), May 2023.
[ paper | bibtex | teaser | video ]
Other Research
Detecting and Analyzing Coordinated Accounts Operated by Misinformation Campaigns
Previous work has shown that social media's spread of information is greatly impacted by hidden account groups, many of which are coordinated accounts operated by misinformation campaigns. This form of abuse to spread misinformation has been seen in various fields, such as healthcare (e.g., COVID-19) and politics (e.g., the US elections). In this project, we aim to detect and analyze the behavior of these coordinated accounts operated by misinformation campaigns. Specifically, we are interested in: (1) How do coordinated accounts participate in discussions on social media? (2) Can we automatically detect coordinated accounts using these cues? If so, what are the most significant features we should consider? To explore these questions, we take COVID-19-related posts on Twitter from March 1 to July 22, 2021, as a case study. We conduct content analysis and user behavior analysis on officially suspended accounts and normal accounts based on linguistic cues and synchronized activity and review cutting-edge technologies for coordination detection.
[ paper ]
AKER: Safe and Secure SoC Access Control
The growing popularity of modular system-on-chip (SoC) architectures presents an increasing need for defense against sensitive data access from malicious hardware. In securitycritical applications, IP cores have different privilege levels for accessing shared resources, which must be regulated by an access control system. AKER is an existing high-performance modular access control framework for AMBA AXI4 on-chip interconnects. We have developing a simplified adaptation of AKER onto network-on-chip (NoC) applications to form a high-bandwidth access control wrapper (ACW). This adaptation is implemented onto ESP, an open-source rapid SoC development platform created by the University of Columbia. This modification enables secure protection of sensitive data against malicious hardware accelerator implementations on the ESP platform.
Contact! I’m open to collaborations, so feel free to contact me if you have any cool ideas.