Squash Your Security Bugs, Before They Squash You!

November 11, 2010
Todd Austin | University of Michigan

Modern software is fraught with bugs that allow hackers to overtake and control computing systems. The current approach to dealing with these attacks invites the criminal hacker into the software design cycle, resulting in great losses to customers and developers. In this talk, I’ll focus on a better approach to building secure software that leverages security vulnerability analysis to find the bugs that hackers love, long before they can be exploited. This approach to secure software development is a powerful one, but also very expensive.
To address this issue, I will introduce the Testudo project that is developing novel hardware and software technologies to massively scale the performance of security vulnerability analyses by pushing them into the field where they run continuously but with imperceptible performance impact.

Speaker Details

Todd Austin is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research interests include computer architecture, compilers, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools. Prior to joining academia, Todd was a Senior Computer Architect in Intel’s Microcomputer Research Labs, a product-oriented research laboratory in Hillsboro, Oregon. Todd is the first to take credit (but the last to accept blame) for creating the SimpleScalar Tool Set, a popular collection of computer architecture performance analysis tools. In addition to his work in academia, Todd is co-founder SimpleScalar LLC and InTempo Design LLC. Todd received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1996.