Workshop on Architectural Support for Security and Anti-Virus (WASSA)

October 9, 2004

Held in conjunction with

the 11th International Conference on Architectural Support

for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

ASPLOS-XI

Park Plaza Hotel

Boston, MA

Organizer:

David Kaeli - Northeastern University, kaeli@ece.neu.edu

The final program is now available HERE.

Topics:

As the size of the Internet has grown, the opportunities for security attacks have also grown. Malicious code can be used to infect single systems, a local network of systems, or can replicate itself across the entire Internet. The impact can be limited to incapacitating a single machine, to disabling a network switch, or to flooding an Internet site with so much traffic as to make it unreachable.

WASSA will provide a forum for researchers working on architectural approaches to remedy these problems to discuss their research. Little has been done in the past by the architecture community to develop new strategies for protecting computing systems from malicious software attacks, or develop strategies to accelerate anti-virus workloads. Only recently have we begun to see a new ideas being submitted to architecture conferences that address this important issue.

Given the current focus of the architectural community on performance and power, it has been difficult for researchers that are focused on security and anti-virus architectural mechanisms to get papers published. We hope that this workshop will both serve as natural place to present these important contributions, as well a forum to develop new quantitative measures that can be used to judge the merits of new security/anti-virus proposals.

Dr. David Chess from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center will provide an invited talk on "Security in Autonomic Computing." Dr. Chess was on the team that developed and supported IBM AntiVirus. He is currently a Research Staff Member in the Autonomic Computing Science, Technology, and Standards group, working on the architecture and security of autonomic computing systems, and building prototype autonomic systems.

All papers accepted to WASSA will appear in the December issue of ACM SIGArch Computer Architecture News.

Workshop topics include:

  • New microarchitectural features
  • Hardware/software approaches
  • Quantitative metrics
  • Anti-virus workload characterization
  • Security benchmarks
  • Network security architectures
  • Storage/disk-side architectures
  • Tradeoffs of security/performance/power
  • Encryption architectures

    • Program Committee:

  • Agnes Chan - Northeastern University
  • David Kaeli - Northeastern University
  • Gyungho Lee - University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Ruby Lee - Princeton University
  • David Lie - University of Toronto
  • Andras Moritz - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Sanjay Patel - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Assaf Schuster - Technion, Israel
  • Timothy Sherwood - University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Michael Smith - Harvard University
  • Yan Solihin - North Carolina State University
  • Richard Uhlig - Intel
  • Linda Wills - Georgia Tech

    • For more information, contact David Kaeli (kaeli@ece.neu.edu).