Some big problems of simple systems

Presenter

Ari Trachtenberg

Abstract

Even relatively simple and well-understood systems face significant implementational challenges that may not be understood until well after they are deployed and in widespread use. This talk will discuss our recent research into two such systems: (i) the operating system page cache, wherein efficiency considerations inherently lead to side-channels and covert channels that cannot be easily stamped out, and (ii) the Bitcoin network, where efficient transaction dissemination has important democratizing features.

Reference

• Daniel Gruss, Erik Kraft, Trishita Tiwari, Michael Schwarz, Ari Trachtenberg, Jason Hennessey, Alex Ionescu, and Anders Fogh. 2019. Page Cache Attacks. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3339809
• Novak Boškov, Şevval Şimşek, Ari Trachtenberg, and David Starobinski, Out-Of-Band Sync of Transaction Poolsfor Large-Scale Blockchains, IEEE ICBC 2023, best paper .