Workshop on Energy-Secure System Architectures (In Conjunction with HOST2019)

ESSA 2019


Computer Security & Cryptography Security & Trust & Testing



The "power wall" has forced chip and system architects to design with smaller margins between nominal and worst-case operating points. Dynamic power, voltage noise and thermal management control loops have already become an integral part of chip and system design. New research papers in “wear out” and general reliability management have recently been published.
These new generation management protocols have, however, opened up other sources of concern: e.g. control loop stability and robustness of the management protocols. The potential security holes exposed by the integrated control loops and system safety issues triggered by potential violations of power or thermal limits are other areas of concern. Also, side channel attack scenarios enabled by modulated power profiles have been documented in prior research.
We seek to motivate the research community into adopting a holistic approach to mitigating the power wall and the concomitant reliability-security wall. We have coined the term "Energy-Secure System Architectures" to cover the range of research being pursued within industry and academia in order to ensure robust and secure functionality, while meeting the energy-related constraints of the "green computing" era. This segmented workshop offering, composed of lectures provided by experts in the areas of power/thermal management, reliability and security, provides a comprehensive view of the hardware and software aspects of Energy-Secure System Architectures. Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract (2 pages in length) on the workshop theme, focusing on the interactions of power management and security.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Power, noise and thermal management solutions for modern multi-core platforms: with a focus on reliability and security challenges.
- Verification and design for verification of system-level power, noise and thermal managers: predeployment safeguards against security breaches.
- Reliability and security holes exposed by power/thermal management protocols: specific examples of attack scenarios.
- Security-aware dynamic power management: software-hardware architectural concepts.
- Use of machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL) principles in safeguarding against energy attacks in processors, server systems and data-centers.
- Architectural implications of and system software support for energy-secure systems.
- Security and reliability issues in emerging low power processor and memory technology.
- Resilience and security challenges of ultra-low power cognitive IoT systems
Energy-secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
- Metrics for quantifying energy-security of computing systems.
Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop report.
Selected papers presented in the workshop will be invited to submit revised (updated) versions to a peer-reviewed special issue of IEEE Security and Privacy (to be organized; co-guest edited by the organizers of this workshop).