Attend the Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations Colloquium Series, May 22
The Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations, or CTF, at Arizona State University would like to invite you to the upcoming CTF Colloquium Series with Marius Momeu.
Retrofitting Commodity Hardware Extensions to Secure OS Kernels
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Noon–1 p.m.
Brickyard (BYENG) 210, Tempe campus [map]
Attend online via Zoom
Abstract: Despite years of research, modern operating system, or OS, kernels are still daunted by memory-safety vulnerabilities, as existing solutions fail to live up to the performance and security requirements of bare metal software. Lately, several central processing unit extensions have been shipped in silicon that software developers can leverage to harden low-level code bases efficiently. In this talk, Marius Momeu, a doctoral degree candidate of information technology security at the Technical University of Munich, will present his work (IUBIK, IEEE S&P 2025; Safeslab, ACM CCS 2024; ISLAB, ACM AsiaCCS 2024; xMP, S&P 2020) on retrofitting commodity hardware extensions in memory-unsafe software to neutralize attacks at different layers of the exploit chain while analyzing the different security and performance tradeoffs they entail. In addition, Momeu will dissect widely-used techniques to exploit memory bugs in OS kernels, highlight why existing defenses fall short against advanced exploits and discuss novel ideas for redesigning the kernel’s memory layout to mitigate them efficiently.
Bio: Marius Momeu is a final-year doctoral degree candidate at the Technical University of Munich in Germany in the Chair of IT Security led by Claudia Eckert, a professor of information technology security. Momeu also works closely with Vasilis Kemerlis, an assistant professor of computer science at Brown University, where he spent six months in 2024 as a visiting researcher. Momeu’s work aims to combat memory-safety vulnerabilities in systems software by combining software and hardware co-design with automation to analyze, test and harden large memory-unsafe code bases, such as OS kernels or hypervisors, efficiently. He also takes part in real-world vulnerability research programs such as Google’s kernelCTF, where he evaluates the effectiveness of existing defenses against real-world common vulnerabilities and exposures.