Berk Gulmezoglu
Iowa State University, IA·Computer Science
Virtual and augmented reality headsets are increasingly used for games, education, healthcare and job training. To work, these devices constantly sense their users and surroundings, recording detailed data about people's bodies, movements and rooms.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
hardware security
microarchitectural side-channels
side-channel attacks
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Develop automated methods to discover and describe how little-studied low-level hardware behaviors in virtual and augmented reality devices can create side-channels that leak private user data.
- Demonstrate how an untrusted app can infer sensitive user activity by combining several side-channel signals that each look harmless on their own, and measure how severe these attacks are on real devices.
- Design and evaluate a hardening toolkit that blocks these hardware side-channels with low performance cost and can be used across the varied hardware in immersive systems.
More about the research
Even when an app is denied direct access to that data, it may still learn private information by watching how the device's hardware behaves. For example, it might track timing differences or how shared hardware resources are being used. A leak of this kind is called a hardware side-channel. Such leaks come from the low-level microarchitecture, meaning how the processor is built internally. Because they are not in the software, ordinary software-focused security models can miss them.
Why it matters
As more people use headsets for school, medical care and work, apps could quietly infer users' movements and activities through hardware leaks. Practical, low-cost defenses could protect the privacy of headset users. The findings could also help device makers and industry security standards, and the open-source tools would let other developers adopt these protections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tian Guo
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA·Computer Science·Early-career
Design QCloud, a quantum cloud framework with job placement, job scheduling and network scheduling algorithms built on models of quantum circuits, gates and remote gates executed across networked machines.
Gail Kaiser
Columbia University, NY·Computer Science
Design a container architecture with a tiny trusted computing base that protects application registers, memory and files from a compromised operating system, without changing application source code.
Yingyan Lin
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Computer Science·Early-career
Create algorithms that summarize streaming data on each edge device to cut memory use and latency while preserving privacy, as the basis for decentralized incremental learning.
The school
Iowa State University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $462M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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