EE Seminar: Untangling Storage Complexity to Improve Performance and Security
(The talk will be given in English)
Speaker: Dr. Aviad Zuck
Department of Computer Sciences, Technion
Sunday, December 22nd, 2019
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Untangling Storage Complexity to Improve Performance and Security
Abstract
New generations of non-volatile storage technologies, most pertinently flash, yield tremendous performance and capacity benefits. Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are integrated in an increasing variety of computing systems including mobile phones, IoT devices, and automobiles. However, the increasing proliferation of SSDs comes at a price. To minimize disruption to the storage stack of modern operating systems and protect intellectual property SSD vendors package the underlying media in a complex layer of proprietary firmware and hardware. The result is a gross misunderstanding of key features of SSDs, which in turn leads to suboptimal utilization and security vulnerabilities. In this talk I will discuss wear out attacks, a new attack vector with potential danger for mobile device integrity, and its implications for operating systems. I will also review an ongoing line of work on reverse engineering SSDs to improve their performance.
Short Bio
Aviad Zuck is a researcher in Computer Science Department at the Technion where he was previously a post-doctoral fellow hosted by Prof. Dan Tsafrir. His research interests are in the intersection of new storage technologies and data security. Aviad earned his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, advised by Prof. Sivan Toledo. Prior to that, he obtained a B.Sc and M.Sc in computer science (both summa cum laude) at Tel Aviv University. Aviad has also worked and interned over the years in several leading research labs in industry, including IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and PMC-Sierra.
