Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis of Brown University

Abstract: Today's operating systems are large, complex, and plagued with vulnerabilities that allow perpetrators to exploit them for profit. The constant rise in the number of software weaknesses, coupled with the sophistication of modern adversaries, make the need for effective and agile defenses more critical than ever. In this talk, I will present my work on developing novel protection mechanisms and exploit prevention techniques that improve the security posture of commodity operating systems. In particular, I will discuss kGuard, XPFO, and kR^X, three projects whose goal is to harden contemporary OSes against attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in kernel code, without entailing super-privileged software (e.g., a hypervisor or VMM). In addition, I will talk about ret2dir, a new kernel exploitation technique that I developed, which uncovered how fundamental OS design practices and implementation decisions can significantly weaken the effectiveness of state of-the-art kernel protection mechanisms.

Biography:

Bio: Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. His research interests are in the areas of systems and software security, with a focus on OS kernel protection, automated software hardening, and information-flow tracking. His work on kernel exploitation has been profiled by press and social media outlets, including Dark Reading, Hacker News, Reddit, and LWN.net, won the first prize in the Applied Security Research Paper competition, at the Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) 2014, and led to the adoption of kernel hardening techniques from OpenBSD, Qualcomm's MSM Android, and Linux. In addition, Vasilis has contributed to the design and implementation of Microsoft's primary solution for automatically triaging crash dumps, which is now part of the Windows Error Reporting Platform. In the past, he was a member of the Solaris Core Kernel team at Oracle, where he worked on adding support for full Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) in the Solaris OS. Lastly, Vasilis has co-invented the first cache-based side channel attack that can be entirely executed from JavaScript context, which resulted in Apple and Mozilla limiting the time resolution of JavaScript's performance API (as a mitigation to the proposed attack), and the Tor Project decreasing the time precision of JavaScript entirely. Vasilis holds a PhD (2015), MPhil (2013), and MS (2010) in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a BS (2006) in Computer Science from Athens University of Economics and Business.

Email:

Address:Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Vasileios (Vasilis) Kemerlis of Brown University

Biography:

Email:

Address:Providence, Rhode Island, United States