William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of computer science Ashish Venkat and his two collaborators have been honored as a 2020 Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security for their paper “Context-Sensitive Fencing: Securing Speculative Execution via Microcode Customization.”Featured at the 2020 International Conference on Computer Aided Design, the paper was selected among hardware security conference papers that have appeared in the last five years in leading architecture, security, and very large-scale integration design conferences.
Venkat's co-authors are Dean M. Tullsen, professor and chair of the Jacobs School of Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and computer science Ph.D. student Mohammadkazem Taram, also at the University of California, San Diego.
The paper was originally published in 2019 at ASPLOS, a top-tier CS conference for inter-disciplinary research in Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems.