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.
Microarchitecture Security Conference (uASC)
Hidden in Plain Sight: Scriptless Microarchitectural Attacks via TrueType Font Hinting
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
Cascading Spy Sheets: Exploiting the Complexity of Modern CSS for Email and Browser Fingerprinting
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)
No Leakage Without State Change: Repurposing Configurable CPU Exceptions to Prevent Microarchitectural Attacks
Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)
CacheWarp: Software-based Fault Injection using Selective State Reset
ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS)
Switchpoline: A Software Mitigation for Spectre-BTB and Spectre-BHB on ARMv
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
Efficient and Generic Microarchitectural Hash-Function Recovery
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS)
A Rowhammer Reproduction Study Using the Blacksmith Fuzzer
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS)
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS)
Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX-Security)
Collide+Power: Leaking Inaccessible Data with Software-based Power Side Channels