On 10 August, Intel announced the winners of its second annual Intel Hardware Security Academic Award program, aimed at fostering innovative research into solutions, tools and methodologies to address fundamental security challenges and enhance the industry’s ability to deliver more secure and trustworthy foundational technologies.
This year, Intel added a Test of Time award to the program to honour papers published 10+ years ago that have demonstrated a significant and lasting impact in the security field. After careful consideration, the program committee has chosen the paper, AEGIS: architecture for tamper-evident and tamper-resistant processing, for the Test of Time award. Intel adopted the idea of secure containers - called secure enclave in Intel SGX - and also adopted (and improved) the memory integrity checking scheme (based on a hash tree). CWI’s Marten van Dijk is one of the authors of this paper.
Published in 2003, this research describes a single-chip secure processor including a configuration where the underlying system software is untrusted. The proposed architecture incorporated several novel ideas at that time, such as cryptographic measurement and attestation, memory integrity verification and memory encryption. This work helped inspire the broader domain of trustworthy computing and the practical realization of the novel features can be found in a wide range of trusted execution environments (TEEs) deployed across the industry today.
The winning team included:
- Edward Suh, Professor, Cornell University, Research Scientist, Meta AI
- Dwaine Clarke, Senior Lecturer, University of the West Indies
- Blaise Gassend, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Waymo
- Marten van Dijk, Professor, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Affiliated Professor, University of Connecticut
- Srinivas Devadas, Webster Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
About Marten van Dijk
As head of CWI’s Computer Security group Marten van Dijk is a very experienced computer security researcher, both in academia and industry. Early in his career he became the lead inventor of the error correcting codes used in Blu-ray discs at Philips Research Lab. At RSA Labs in the USA, he co-designed the awarded IRIS authenticated file system. His research on fully homomorphic encryption over integers was nominated for Best Paper Award at Eurocrypt 2010. In 2022 Van Dijk has received the IEEE Fellowship from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE.
Van Dijk has also published on hardware security and cyber physical system security. He worked with Intel-SGX, studied the security of so-called cloud FPGAs, adversarial machine learning and differential privacy for federated learning. He continues research in secure computing environments for robust intelligence and started the Dutch Secure Autonomous Cloud (DUSAC) initiative.
Apart from his work at CWI Van Dijk holds a professorship at the ECE department at the University of Connecticut. Marten van Dijk has published more than 100 papers in applied cryptography and hardware security and is quoted over 16,500 times with an H-index of 53 on Google scholar.
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