Student Presentations

Talk Title: FHECore: Rethinking GPU Microarchitecture for Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Speaker: Lohit Daksha, PhD Candidate, Boston University

Abstract:
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computation on encrypted data but comes with orders-of-magnitude higher compute and memory costs than plaintext processing.GPUs are attractive for accelerating FHE due to their parallelism and ubiquity, but their tensor cores are optimized for low-precision ML tasks, not the wide-integer modular arithmetic central to FHE.We propose FHECore, a specialized functional unit within the streaming multiprocessor that natively supports INT32 modulo linear transformations, eliminating the need for costly decomposition onto tensor cores. FHECore improves programmability via an ISA extension and reduces dynamic instruction count. Our simulations demonstrate 1.3 – 2.4× gains in performance and 1.7 – 2.7× smaller program sizes with only a 2.4% area overhead on the A100 GPU, making FHECore an efficient path to accelerating encrypted computation on GPUs.

Talk Title: Zeus-IoT: Comprehensive Code Signing to Prevent IoT Device Weaponization

Speaker: Alireza Roshandel, PhD Candidate, Boston University

Abstract:
IoT devices have static software packages and do not serve as general-purpose machines, which makes Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA)-style integrity checks feasible. However, IMA measures only native binaries and fails to detect interpreter-loaded scripts that bypass its mmap hooks. We propose Zeus-IoT, which generates an allowlist at build time from all files in the firmware image. At runtime, Zeus-IoT uses this allowlist to verify the integrity of every executable before it runs and extends integrity verification to interpreter-loaded code, addressing a major limitation of previous work. We integrated Zeus-IoT into OpenWrt, a widely used aftermarket IoT operating system, and evaluated it in both QEMU emulation and commodity routers. Our evaluation against more than 81,000 IoT malware samples showed 100% prevention, and we observed no measurable overhead on the router’s core functionality, which is packet routing.

Bio:
Alireza Roshandel is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University and a member of SecLaBU. His research focuses on system and software security.