High-Performance and Crash-Recoverable Security Support for Emerging Memory Architectures

Security is becoming a top-priority design requirement in computing systems. It is critical to rethink today’s data protection mechanisms for future memory technologies with security. For instance, the integrity and confidentiality of data while off-chip is crucial due to untrusted supply chains and limited physical environment control near data/computations (e.g., cloud systems and edge devices). Moreover, new memory technologies such as non-volatile memories (NVMs) enable specific system features, such as persistent data storage, which necessitates and complicates data protection implementation. Examples of such challenges include ensuring recoverability, reliability of security metadata, availability, ultra-fast recovery, low write overheads and fast data persistence in secure persistent memories. We will discuss these challenges for implementing security for persistent memory and our contributions to overcome them during this talk. Furthermore, we will showcase some of the challenges for implementing security in hardware accelerators. Finally, I will touch on my vision for leveraging future memory technologies in next-generation computing systems

Amro Awad

Assistant Professor, NC State on November 18, 2022 at 10:15 AM in EB2 1025

Amro Awad is currently an assistant professor and leads the Secure and Advanced Computer Architecture (SACA) research group at NC State. Before joining NC State in Fall 2020, he was an assistant professor at UCF (2017-2020). Before that, he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) at the Scalable Computer Architecture group (org. 1422) in Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque NM. Amro received his Ph.D. degree from NC State University in 2016. During his Ph.D., he had several stints at LANL, HP Labs and AMD Research. His research papers have been published in top-venues in computer architecture, such as ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, ASPLOS, PACT and ICS. Some of his papers were best paper award candidates in major conferences such as VR'22 and ICS’21, and won the outstanding paper award in HPCC’21. He holds eight granted patents (more than six pending). His research has been funded through several Department of Defense (DoD) agencies (DARPA, ONR, AFRL, NSWCDD), Sandia National Labs and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He was also an Air Force Summer Faculty Fellow for 2018 and 2020. His research interests include secure memory systems, emerging memory architectures, architectural modeling and simulation, and hardware/software co-design.

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!