My Favorite Side-Channels

Speaker/Bio

Ari Trachtenberg is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and an affiliate of computer science at Boston University. His main research interests lie in the effects of sleep deprivation on the quality of computer security research. Alas, his findings, thusfar, are largely negative.

Abstract

Suppose that every time you visited one of my talks, you found people sleeping. Without even knowing the title or abstract of this talk, you might thus infer that (i) you will likewise find sleeping attendees here and, (ii) inversely, by changing the author name you may keep people awake. Indeed, in this (complete hypothetical) scenario, the speaker name is a side-channel that reflects on (and, perhaps controls) the somnolent state of the audience.

In this talk, I will outline some of my favorite cyber side-channels from the last ten years of literature, shamelessly highlighting some of the research in my lab.