22.07.2025
Weird Microarchitectural Gates – Beyond Boolean Logic
Abstract
Over the last few years, multiple works have investigated the ability for performing computation on microarchitectural state. These works demonstrate techniques for creating weird gates that use microarchitectural state to represent Boolean values and perform logical functions on this state. Beyond showing that the gates are functionally complete, i.e., that they can compute any Boolean function, these works explore the security implications of using these gates.
This talk observes that the semantics of both microarchitectural state and weird gates extend well beyond Boolean logic and allow a much richer set of operations. We show how these semantics can be used for interrogating the hardware at a high precision and to improve the temporal resolution of cache attacks.
Bio
Yuval Yarom is a Professor of Computer Security at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on the interface between the software and the hardware. In particular, He is interested in the discrepancy between the way that programmers think about software execution and the concrete execution in modern processors. He is a recipient of a 2020 ARC Discovery Early Career Award and the 2020 CORE Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research, a 2020 Young Tall Poppy. His research has won best paper awards at CCS 2024, PLDI 2023, IEEE SP 2019, EuroSys 2019, ApSys 2018, and best student paper award at ICEIS 2020. Previously, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide, the Vice President of Research in Memco Software, and a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Girafa.com. Yuval earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide in 2014, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993 and 1990, respectively.
More: https://yuval.yarom.org
Photo © Hillary Brooks
Over the last few years, multiple works have investigated the ability for performing computation on microarchitectural state. These works demonstrate techniques for creating weird gates that use microarchitectural state to represent Boolean values and perform logical functions on this state. Beyond showing that the gates are functionally complete, i.e., that they can compute any Boolean function, these works explore the security implications of using these gates.
This talk observes that the semantics of both microarchitectural state and weird gates extend well beyond Boolean logic and allow a much richer set of operations. We show how these semantics can be used for interrogating the hardware at a high precision and to improve the temporal resolution of cache attacks.
Bio
Yuval Yarom is a Professor of Computer Security at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on the interface between the software and the hardware. In particular, He is interested in the discrepancy between the way that programmers think about software execution and the concrete execution in modern processors. He is a recipient of a 2020 ARC Discovery Early Career Award and the 2020 CORE Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research, a 2020 Young Tall Poppy. His research has won best paper awards at CCS 2024, PLDI 2023, IEEE SP 2019, EuroSys 2019, ApSys 2018, and best student paper award at ICEIS 2020. Previously, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide, the Vice President of Research in Memco Software, and a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Girafa.com. Yuval earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide in 2014, and an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993 and 1990, respectively.
More: https://yuval.yarom.org
Photo © Hillary Brooks