[HN Gopher] MIT 6.5950 Secure Hardware Design - An open-source c...
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MIT 6.5950 Secure Hardware Design - An open-source course on
hardware attacks
Author : imakwana
Score : 230 points
Date : 2025-04-02 21:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (shd.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (shd.mit.edu)
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Does this include Spectre?
| LPisGood wrote:
| It starts with necessary background into cache side channels
| and covers transient execution attacks like Spectre.
| jprx wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Our labs include building your own real spectre attack against
| the kernel, bypassing ASLR and building ROP chains with various
| side channels, finding and exploiting backdoors in a RISC-V CPU
| by building a hardware fuzzer, and more.
|
| (source: I designed the Spectre lab plus a few others)
|
| All our labs are fully open source for anyone to try:
| https://github.com/MATCHA-MIT/SHD-StarterCode
|
| If you give them a try, please do let us know what you think!
| We genuinely want these activities to be fun and approachable
| (we designed them like a big CTF) and welcome feedback from the
| community.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Do you support arm64e?
| jprx wrote:
| We teach using Intel X86_64 CPUs for a variety of reasons
|
| - Most academic research has been done on Intel systems, so
| it's easier for students reading papers to relate to their
| experiences in the labs
|
| - X86_64 provides convenient cache flush and cycle
| measurement instructions in userspace
|
| - Intel's strongly ordered memory model and cache inclusion
| policy makes cross-core side channels simpler to reason
| about
|
| - Practically, it's easier to scale up server
| infrastructure on Intel (you can do most of the labs on
| inexpensive Intel-based Linux systems)
|
| - For Rowhammer, our students attack one particular kind of
| DRAM that we have profiled and know works well with our
| machines
|
| - Note that AMD's cache inclusion policy differs from
| Intel's- we only support Intel chips for now
|
| Down the road I could see us moving to ARM for a few labs
| (perhaps a future PACMAN attack lab...?)
| SilverSlash wrote:
| Any plans to make lecture videos available as well?
| klop1 wrote:
| I actually did these a while ago. Courses taught me a lot and
| have recommended it to friends since. Very grateful for the
| course team for making everything public :)
| Akhilmurali wrote:
| Hey! I was curious how did you get access to the lectures? You
| said that the material is public, can you please help me locate
| the lecture vidoes?
| stavros wrote:
| I have the same question, I'd love to watch the presentations
| in my own time, but I don't want to sign up for something
| that will have strict deadlines, as my schedule doesn't allow
| that.
|
| Does anyone know which kind of the two above this course is?
| I couldn't find that info.
| jprx wrote:
| You can find PDFs of the lectures as well as the reading
| list here:
|
| https://shd.mit.edu/2025/calendar.html
|
| https://shd.mit.edu/2025/lectureReadings.html
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks, but it looks like the videos aren't available, so
| I'm not sure why the title says "open source".
| mettamage wrote:
| Reminds me of hardware security at VUSEC Amsterdam :)
|
| Good times!
| oytis wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated, but - is it just me or do other people notice
| too, that whenever a major university publishes course materials
| online, the instructors there are normally very young? It wasn't
| like that a while ago, e.g. when Coursera started, or it is not
| like that if you look at older MIT videos.
|
| Does it reflect university teachers getting younger? Or younger
| teachers tend to give more effort to putting everything online?
| Or did my perception change with age?
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Younger teachers get "out there" for the same class of reasons
| software developers today want to be more "out there" -
| website,twitter,etc - compared to the relatively quieter
| personal websites of the last generation.
| jprx wrote:
| Personally, I learned programming when I was a kid by watching
| YouTube tutorials + reading random Internet sources. When
| helping build SHD, it was important to me that we "paid it
| forward" & made all our lab materials open for everyone to
| learn from.
|
| Hopefully someone out there finds it useful!
| ignoramous wrote:
| If you're looking for a quick overview, Satnam Singh who worked
| at Google on _Silver Oak_ / _OpenTitan_ , gave an interesting 50m
| talk related to his work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ujmgPCIWuU4
| / mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/ujmgPCIWuU4 [summary:
| https://g.co/gemini/share/07c6439e8a78 / mirror:
| https://archive.vn/51k4y]
|
| _OpenTitan_ (RISC-V based tamper-resistant open specification
| RoT /TPM/SE) themselves have a neat write-up on designing against
| hardware attacks:
| https://opentitan.org/book/doc/security/implementation_guide... /
| mirror: https://archive.vn/UqAVo
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(page generated 2025-04-03 23:02 UTC)