Simha Sethumadhavan

Computer Science

Simha Sethumadhavan’s research is focused on finding practical solutions to problems in area of cybersecurity.  Sethumadhavan is best known for his "hardware-up" principle for designing secure systems. This principle guides design of computer and cyber-physical systems when security is a first order design requirement; it teaches how foundations for security and trust can be built into hardware. 

  • IEEE
  • ACM
  • NSF CAREER Award (Trustworthy Hardware from Untrustworthy Components) (2011)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (2013 - 2017)
  • IEEE Micro “Top Picks in Computer Architecture” (2017)
  • IEEE Micro “Top Picks in Computer Architecture” (2013)
  • IEEE Micro “Top Picks in Computer Architecture” (2004)
  • Best Student Paper Award at ACM Computer Communications Security Conference (2013)
  • Best Poster Award at Hot Chips (2015)
  • Distinguished Paper Award at Intl. Conference on Program Comprehension (2016)
  • Best of CAL paper award for short paper on Hardware Support for Privacy (2016)
  • IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award (2014)
  • Department of Computer Sciences at UT-Austin, Teaching Assistant Excellence Award (2006) Citation reads “For Dedication and Outstanding Service”
  • Department of Computer Sciences J.C. Browne Fellowship (2005) Awarded to “Outstanding Graduate Students in Computer Sciences”
  • Current: ONR
  • Past: DARPA, NSF
  • Industrial Gifts: Bloomberg, IBM and Microsoft
  • Adam Waksman and Simha Sethumadhavan. 2011. Silencing Hardware Backdoors. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP '11). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 49-63.
  • John Demme, Robert Martin, Adam Waksman, and Simha Sethumadhavan. 2012. Side-channel vulnerability factor: a metric for measuring information leakage. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '12). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 106-117.
  • Adam Waksman, Matthew Suozzo, and Simha Sethumadhavan. 2013. FANCI: identification of stealthy malicious logic using boolean functional analysis. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security (CCS '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 697-708. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2508859.2516654
  • John Demme, Matthew Maycock, Jared Schmitz, Adrian Tang, Adam Waksman, Simha Sethumadhavan, and Salvatore Stolfo. 2013. On the feasibility of online malware detection with performance counters. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 559-570. 
  • Tang A., Sethumadhavan S., Stolfo S.J. (2014) Unsupervised Anomaly-Based Malware Detection Using Hardware Features. In: Stavrou A., Bos H., Portokalidis G. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses. RAID 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8688. Springer, Cham
  • Yipeng Huang, Ning Guo, Mingoo Seok, Yannis Tsividis and Simha Sethumadhavan, "Evaluation of an Analog Accelerator for Linear Algebra," 2016 ACM/IEEE 43rd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Seoul, 2016, pp. 570-582.
  • Yossef Oren, Vasileios P. Kemerlis, Simha Sethumadhavan, and Angelos D. Keromytis. 2015. The Spy in the Sandbox: Practical Cache Attacks in JavaScript and their Implications. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1406-1418.
  • Joël Porquet and Simha Sethumadhavan. 2013. WHISK: an uncore architecture for dynamic information flow tracking in heterogeneous embedded SoCs. In Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS '13). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA
  • Fang-Hsiang Su, Jonathan Bell, Kenneth Harvey, Simha Sethumadhavan, Gail Kaiser and Tony Jebara. Code Relatives: Detecting Similarly Behaving Software,  ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Seattle, WA, 2016
  • Kanad Sinha, Vasileios P. Kemerlis    and Simha Sethumadhavan. Reviving Instruction Set Randomization, IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust, Washington, VA, 2017