Secure Systems and Architectures Lab

The SsysArch Research Group is part of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UCLA, and it is directed by Professor Nader Sehatbakhsh. Our research has been focused on improving the system security of cyber-physical, embedded, and resource-constrained systems. We study how security can be ensured by finding new vulnerabilities, implementing new attacks, and developing effective defenses. Our research is generally divided into three broad categories: computer architecture security, IoT and mobile computing security and machine learning security and privacy. We have published at top-tier computer architecture conferences, mobile computing conferences, and security conferences. Our work is interdisciplinary, spanning Computer Architecture, Security, Hardware Design, Machine Learning, Digital Signal Processing, and System design. To learn more about our research, please see our Projects page. We always look for interested and highly-motivated undergrad and graduate (MS and Ph.D.) students. We are a diverse and inclusive group and would love to have you join us!

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NEWS

🏆 Congratulations Hossein on receving the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship Award! Sneha has joined the SsysArch lab to start her PhD! Welcome Sneha! New paper published at IEEE CAL. The title is "Security Helper Chiplets: A New Paradigm for Secure Hardware Monitoring." Find more information here. A new paper titled "Chimera: Creating Digitally Signed Fake Photos by Fooling Image Recapture and Deepfake Detectors," is accepted at Usenix Security 2025. Read more about it here. Three updates: we have two new PhD students this fall: Fan and Samuel! Also, Pooya has departed our lab with an MS degree. He is joining AMD! A new paper titled "LightPure: Realtime Adversarial Image Purification for Mobile Devices Using Diffusion Models," will be presented at MobiCom 2024 in November. Read more about it here. Our group presents two papers at IEEE S&P workshops (SafeThings). Fatemeh and Hossein are presenting our papers: 1- "Unleash the Power: Non-Invasive On-Chip Malware Detection in Heterogeneous IoT Systems by Leveraging Side-Channels," and 2- "Virtual Keymysteries Unveiled: Detecting Keystrokes in VR with External Side-Channels." Read more about them here. Our lab has received NSF CAREER Award. The title is "CAREER: Integrating Microarchitecture Simulation and Side-Channel Leakage Modeling for Safer Software." More details are here. Fatemeh is presenting our paper, IDA: Hybrid Attestation with Support for Interrupts and TOCTOU, at NDSS this week! Read more about it here. Our lab is presenting two papers at MobiCom and UbiComp this week and next. At MobiCom, we present a new privacy-preserving method for cloud+IoTs. The key idea is to combine encoding with (homomorphic) encryption to improve the end-to-end latency while protecting privacy. In Ubicomp, we present a new method for device fingerprinting. The main insight is to leverage EM side-channels for fingerprinting. Check out our lab website for more information about both papers. Hossein has joined the SsysArch lab to start his PhD! Welcome Hossein! A new NSF funding (CNS Core, CSR, Small) is received. The title is "CSR: Small: Leveraging Physical Side-Channels for Good." This is a single-PI project. More details are here. Pooya is presenting our new paper on chiplet security at DAC this week! See the recent list of our publications here. Nader presented a tutorial on privacy-preserving techniques at Crypto Summer School in Croatia! Details of all tutorial talks and the slides for Nader's talk can be found here. Fatemeh has joined the SsysArch lab to start her PhD! Welcome Fatemeh! One paper (side channel fingerprinting) is accepted in IMWUT 2023! Our paper on the subject of Horizontal Obfuscation is accepted into DAC 2023! Thank you to Yousef Safari from McGill University for the hard work! A new funding by Cisco Research! We will work on designing new trustworthy lightweight machine learning methods for edge and IoTs! One paper (side channel communication) is accepted in IPSN 2023! One paper accepted in ECTC 2023 (chiplet security). Paper (privacy-preserving machine learning) accepted in MobiComm 2023! Details soon! Pooya has joined SsysArch lab to start his PhD! Welcome Pooya! Yousef, a PhD student from McGill, finished his internship at SsysArch Lab! He worked on designing new secure chiplet systems during his internship! We submitted a couple of papers and hope they both appear soon! Our Internet-of-Collaborative-Things (IoCT) project is funded by NSF! More details here. A new project funded by IARPA SCISRS program has been officially started! More details here. Justin and Chris have joined SsysArch as PhD students. Welcome aboard! 👋 The deadline for HASP workshop is coming up. Submit your work! Last day of Rick's internship at SsysArch. Good luck Rick! Our first alumni: Shashank has been graduated with an MS degree! He is joining UCSD as a PhD! Congratulations Shashank! 🎉 Nader is serving on the PC of ISCA and MICRO. Our website is live! Join Us!