Faculty
2020: EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award
2019: NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition Honorable Mention: Meltdown
2019: Open Exploit Award: Meltdown and Spectre
2019: S&P Distinguished Paper Award - Spectre
2018: CSAW Best Paper Award - Meltdown
2018: Pwnie Award for Best Privilege Escalation Bug - Meltdown
2018: Pwnie Awardfor Most Innovative Research - Spectre
Dr. Michael Schwarz is tenured faculty at CISPA with a focus on microarchitectural side-channel attacks and system security. He obtained his PhD with the title "Software-based Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Restricted Environments" in 2019 from Graz University of Technology (advised by Daniel Gruss). He holds two master's degrees, one in computer science and one in software engineering with a strong focus on security. Michael is a regular speaker at both academic and hacker conferences (7 times Black Hat, CCC, Blue Hat, etc.). He was part of one of the research teams that found the Meltdown, Spectre, Fallout, and LVI vulnerabilities, as well as the ZombieLoad vulnerability. He was also part of the KAISER patch, the basis for Meltdown countermeasures now deployed in every modern operating system under names such as KPTI or KVA Shadow.
Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)
InstrSem: Automatically and Generically Inferring Semantics of (Undocumented) CPU Instructions
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
RISCy Cache Coherence: Timer-Free Architectural Cache Attacks via Instruction/Data Cache Incoherence
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
TDXRay: Microarchitectural Side-Channel Analysis of Intel TDX for Real-World Workloads
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
Crucible: Retrofitting Commodity CPUs with Vulnerabilities via Transparent Software Emulation
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
TREVEX: A Black-Box Detection Framework For Data-Flow Transient Execution Vulnerabilities
Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)
StackWarp: Breaking AMD SEV-SNP Integrity via Deterministic Stack-Pointer Manipulation through the CPU’s Stack Engine
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
SNPeek: Side-Channel Analysis for Privacy Applications on Confidential VMs
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
Styled to Steal: The Overlooked Attack Surface in Email Clients
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
RISCover: Automatic Discovery of User-exploitable Architectural Security Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source RISC-V CPUs
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
ExfilState: Automated Discovery of Timer-Free Cache Side Channels on ARM CPUs