Nader Sehatbakhsh


Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Office: Boelter Hall, 6731-G
Email: nsehat [at] ucla [dot] edu
Lab Webpage

scholar twitter cv

I'm looking for highly-motivated students (Undergraduate, MS, Ph.D., and Postdoc students). To find out how you can join our team, or if you are a UCLA student and want to do research, please see this page.

About Me

I run the Secure Systems and Architectures (SsysArch) research lab at UCLA. My research interest is in the broad area of Security and Privacy with emphasis on hardware support for security and privacy. Specifically, I'm interested in computer architecture, IoT Security, embedded/cyber-physical systems, side-channels, trusted computing and hardware enclaves, and security and privacy in machine learning. I'm affiliated with the Computer Engineering Lab in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UCLA.
    Prior to joining to UCLA, I was a PhD student at the School of Computer Science in Georgia Tech working with Professor Milos Prvulovic and Professor Alenka Zajic where I worked on Securing Computing Systems by Mitigating and Leveraging Side-Channels. I earned my PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2020. Before that, I earned my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2013. I joined UCLA since July 2020.

News
  • [10/03] 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.
  • [10/01] Hossein has joined the SsysArch lab to start his PhD! Welcome Hossein!
  • [8/23] 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.
  • [7/23] Pooya is presenting our new paper on chiplet security at DAC this week! See the recent list of our publications here.
  • [6/23] 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.
  • [4/23] Fatemeh has joined the SsysArch lab to start her PhD! Welcome Fatemeh!
  • [4/23] One paper (side channel fingerprinting) is accepted in IMWUT 2023!
  • [2/23] 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!
  • [1/23] A new funding by Cisco Research! We will work on designing new trustworthy lightweight machine learning methods for edge and IoTs!

Recent Publications

For the complete list, please visit my Google Scholar page and our research lab's Publications page.

  • EMSim: A microarchitecture-level simulation tool for modeling electromagnetic side-channel signals,
    Nader Sehatbakhsh, Baki Berkay Yilmaz, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic, HPCA'20.
    ( 🏆 Best Paper Nominee.)

  • A new side-channel vulnerability on modern computers by exploiting electromagnetic emanations from the power management unit,
    Nader Sehatbakhsh, Baki Berkay Yilmaz, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic, HPCA'20.

  • Side-Channel Propagation Measurements and Modeling for Hardware Security in IoT Devices,
    Seun Sangodoyin, Frank T Werner, Baki B Yilmaz, Chia-Lin Cheng, Elvan M Ugurlu, Nader Sehatbakhsh, Milos Prvulović, and Alenka Zajic, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

  • EMMA: Hardware/software attestation framework for embedded systems using electromagnetic signals,
    Nader Sehatbakhsh, Alireza Nazari, Haider Khan, Alenka Zajic, Milos Prvulovic, MICRO'19.

Active Projects

For the complete list of current and past projects, please visit our research lab's Projects page.

  • New Methods and Systems for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning.
  • Side-Channel Signals Modeling.
  • Secure and Private Internet of Trillion Collaborative Things.
  • New Attacks and Defenses for Microarchitectural Side-Channels.

Teaching

Full list can be found here.

  • ECE M116C/CS 151B: Computer Architecture (F23, F22).
  • ECE 209AS: Secure and Trustworthy Edge Computing Systems (IoT Security) (W24, S23).
  • ECE 188: Secure Computer Systems (S22).

Service
Program Committee
  • MICRO, 2019-Current.
  • ISCA, 2020-Current.
  • ESWEEK (CASES), 2021-Current.
  • CEED, 2021-Current.
  • DAC, 2020.
  • ICCPS, 2021.
  • ICCD, 2020-2021.
Journal Reviewer
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2018-2021.
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2019-2021.
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, 2019-2021.
  • ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, 2020.

Students

For the complete list of my current and past students, please visit our research lab's People page.

Following is the current list of my PhD advisees .

  • Justin Feng (2021- )
  • Pooya Aghanoury (2022- )
  • Fatemeh Arkannezhad (2023- )
  • Hossein Khalili (2023- )