Daniel Moghimi
Before joining Google as a Senior Research Scientist, Daniel was a postdoctoral scholar at UCSD. He has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science from WPI. He works on computer and hardware security, spanning various topics such as microarchitectural vulnerabilities, side-channel cryptanalysis, and security architecture. His research has improved the security of superscalar CPUs, memory subsystems, and cryptographic implementations, which billions of users use daily.
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Downfall: Exploiting Speculative Data Gathering
USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX (2023)
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We introduce Downfall attacks, new transient execution attacks that undermine the security of computers running everywhere across the internet. We exploit the gather instruction on high-performance x86 CPUs to leak data across boundaries of user-kernel, processes, virtual machines, and trusted execution environments. We also develop practical and end-to-end attacks to steal cryptographic keys, program’s runtime data, and even data at rest (arbitrary data). Our findings, exploitation techniques, and demonstrated attacks defeat all previous defenses, calling for critical hardware fixes and security updates for widely-used client and server computers.
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