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 lab develops secure and trustworthy computing systems, with an emphasis on emerging and resource-constrained platforms. The key aspect of our research is considering security/privacy as a systems problem alongside other constraints such as performance and power. Our research is organized around two complementary thrusts: Secure Computer Systems, including trustworthy computing, remote attestation, collaborative and battery-free computing, trustworthy AI/ML, and security for embedded, mobile, and robotic systems; and Secure Architectures and Hardware, including secure chiplet systems, hardware security monitoring, side-channel analysis, trustworthy hardware design, and hardware-assisted security. Our work is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning computer architecture, system security, hardware design, machine learning, and embedded and robotic system design, and regularly appears in leading security, architecture, embedded, and mobile computing venues. To learn more about our research, please visit our Projects page. We are always looking for highly motivated students! Please visit our Join Us page to learn how to join our team!
NEWS
Two new papers will be presented at DAC next month in Long Beach! One on a new debugging method based on leveraging side-channels. The second one is on chiplet security for space applications. Additionally, Sneha, Sam, and Edward will present their research via DAC Young Fellows program!
🏆 Congratulations Edward on receiving the UC Leads Fellowship Award!
We have TWO new members! Edward is starting his PhD and Myles is joining us as our new Postdoc! Welcome to the team!
Congratulations Fatemeh on her new paper on remote attestation for energy harvesting/intermittent computing devices. The paper is published at SenSys (part of CPS WEEK) 2026. More information will be shared here.
New paper on the security of VR devices is published at NDSS. Find more information here.
Seongbin has joined the SsysArch Lab as a new Ph.D. student! Seongbin previously completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA. We are excited to welcome her back to UCLA and to the SsysArch family.
🏆 Congratulations Hossein on receiving 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 is accepted at ECTC 2023 (chiplet security).
Our new paper (privacy-preserving machine learning) accepted in MobiComm
2023! Details soon!
Pooya has joined SsysArch lab! 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 has joined SsysArch as PhD students. Our first PhD student!! Welcome
aboard! 👋
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! 🎉
Our website is live! Join Us!
