Events

Module systems like that of Haskell permit only a weak form of modularity in which module implementations depend directly on other implementations and must be processed in dependency order. Module systems like that of ML, on the other hand, permit a stronger form of modularity in which explicit interfaces express assumptions about dependencies and each module can be typechecked and reasoned about independently.

In this thesis, I present Backpack, a new language for building separately-typecheckable packages on top of a weak module system like Haskell’s. The design of Backpack is the first to bring the rich world of type systems to the practical world of packages via mixin modules. It’s inspired by the MixML module calculus of Rossberg and Dreyer but by choosing practicality over expressivity Backpack both simplifies that semantics and supports a flexible notion of applicative instantiation. Moreover, this design is motivated less by foundational concerns and more by the practical concern of integration into Haskell. The result is a new approach to writing modular software at the scale of packages.

The semantics of Backpack is defined via elaboration into sets of Haskell modules and binary interface files, thus showing how Backpack maintains interoperability with Haskell while retrofitting it with interfaces. In my formalization of Backpack I present a novel type system for Haskell modules and I prove a key soundness theorem to validate Backpack’s semantics.

Cloud providers are nervous about recent research showing how Rowhammer attacks affect many types of DRAM including DDR4 and ECC-equipped DRAM.  Unfortunately, cloud providers lack a systematic way to test the DRAM present in their servers for the threat of a Rowhammer attack. Building such a methodology needs to overcome two difficult challenges: (1) devising a CPU instruction sequence that maximizes the rate of DRAM row activations on a given system, and (2) determining the adjacency of rows internal to DRAM. This talk will present an end-to-end methodology that overcomes these challenges to determine if cloud servers are susceptible to Rowhammer attacks. With our methodology, a cloud provider can construct worst-case testing conditions for DRAM.

We used our methodology to create worst-case DRAM testing conditions on the hardware used by a major cloud provider for a recent generation of its servers. Our findings show that none of the instruction sequences used in prior work to mount Rowhammer attacks create worst-case DRAM testing conditions. Instead, we construct an instruction sequence that issues non-explicit load and store instructions. Our new sequence leverages microarchitectural side-effects to ``hammer'' DRAM at a near-optimal rate on modern Skylake platforms. We also designed a DDR4 fault injector capable of reverse engineering row adjacency inside a DRAM device. When applied to our cloud provider's DIMMs, we find that rows inside DDR4 DRAM devices do not always follow a linear map.

Joint work with Lucian Cojocar (VU Amsterdam), Jeremie Kim, Minesh Patel, Onur Mutlu (ETH Zurich), Lily Tsai (MIT), and Alec Wolman (MSR)

In computer vision and machine learning combinatorial optimization problems are widespread, typically NP-hard and tend to pose unique challenges due to their very large scale and problem structure. Established techniques from the mathematical optimization community cannot cope with the encountered problem sizes and do not exploit special problem characteristics. In this talk I will present several new solution paradigms for solving large scale combinatorial problems in computer vision efficiently and to high accuracy. I will discuss how these principles can be applied on classical problems of combinatorial optimization that have found wide use in computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics, namely inference in Markov Random Fields, the quadratic assignment problem and graph decomposition. Lastly, I will show empirical results showing the great practical performance of the presented techniques.

Online services, devices or secret services are constantly collecting data and meta-data from users. This data collection is mostly  used to target users or customise their services. However, as illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica case, data and technologies are more and  more used to manipulate, influence or shape people's opinions online, i.e. to "hack" our brains. In this context, it is urgent to develop the field of  "Cognitive security" in order to better comprehend these attacks and provide counter-measures.  This talk will introduce the concept of "Cognitive security". We will explore the different types of cognitive attacks and discuss possible research directions.