[Security-meetings] Yicheng Zhang to Present Security in Heterogeneous Systems Today (4/22/2025)

[Xinan Zhou]

Hello everyone,

I'm happy to announce that on 4/22 1:00 pm (today), our own UCR PhD
candidate Yicheng Zhang
<https://cybersecurity.cs.ucr.edu/yicheng_zhang.html> will be presenting
his research themed *Security in Heterogeneous Systems* at the
Cybersecurity Reading Group. The venue is Winston Chung Hall 202.

*Yicheng Zhang*
Yicheng Zhang is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of
California, Riverside, advised by Prof. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh. Prior to that,
he received his M.Sc. from UC Irvine and his B.S. from Sichuan University.
His research interests lie in computer architecture and system security,
with a focus on AR/VR security and microarchitectural security. His work
has been recognized by top-tier conferences and journals including multiple
USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, IEEE DSN and IEEE TIFS. More information can be
found at his website: https://yichez.site/

*Abstract*
To improve the performance and efficiency of modern computing systems,
architects increasingly adopt heterogeneous designs that tightly integrate
specialized accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs. These accelerators enable
substantial speedups for compute-intensive workloads like machine learning
and AR/VR. However, they also diverge fundamentally from traditional
CPU-based systems and introduce a new class of security risks. Unlike prior
work that focused on CPU vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown,
heterogeneous systems expose new attack surfaces due to their architectural
complexity and shared resource usage.In this talk, I will present my
research efforts to uncover and mitigate security vulnerabilities in these
heterogeneous platforms. First, I will introduce a set of side-channel
attacks targeting AR/VR devices, leveraging rendering performance counters
to recover sensitive user inputs such as virtual keystrokes and voice
commands. I will then shift to large-scale cloud environments, where I
demonstrate the first end-to-end side-channel attack that exploits NVLink,
NVIDIA’s high-speed GPU interconnect, through contention-based and
performance-counter-based microarchitectural channels. To conclude, I will
present a defense framework that uses GPU side-channel signatures to
validate kernel execution integrity. This approach detects tampering from
attacks like buffer overflows and Rowhammer, turning side channels into a
practical tool for runtime verification.Together, these efforts lay the
groundwork for securing future heterogeneous computing platforms across
both edge and cloud environments.

Thank you,
Xin'an Emmanuel Zhou
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