Demo Data from EDBT 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Bruce Sherwin
dblp:325/3394
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2022
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Network and information security
1 paper |
Hardware security and side channels · 100% | |
| Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
1 paper |
Cloud and datacenter computing · 100% | |
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper |
Operating systems · 100% |
Topics — the 3 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Hardware security and side channels › microarchitectural attacks › transient execution attack
speculative execution attack |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | A Secret-Free Hypervisor: Rethinking Isolation in the Age of Speculative Vulnerabilities · SP 2022 |
Cloud and datacenter computing
virtualization |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | A Secret-Free Hypervisor: Rethinking Isolation in the Age of Speculative Vulnerabilities · SP 2022 |
Operating systems › system security › operating system security › protection mechanism › isolation
kernel isolation |
0.2 | 1 | 2022 | A Secret-Free Hypervisor: Rethinking Isolation in the Age of Speculative Vulnerabilities · SP 2022 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
speculative execution · 1.7allow-list memory partitioning · 1.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | A Secret-Free Hypervisor: Rethinking Isolation in the Age of Speculative VulnerabilitiesabstractIn recent years, the epidemic of speculative side channels significantly increases the difficulty in enforcing domain isolation boundaries in a virtualized cloud environment. Although mitigations exist, the approach taken by the industry is neither a long-term nor a scalable solution, as we target each vulnerability with specific mitigations that add up to substantial performance penalties. We propose a different approach to secret isolation: guaranteeing that the hypervisor is Secret-Free (SF). A Secret-Free design partitions memory into secrets and non-secrets and reconstructs hypervisor isolation. It enforces that all domains have a minimal and secret-free view of the address space. In contrast to state-of-the-art, a Secret-Free hypervisor does not identify secrets to be hidden, but instead identifies non-secrets that can be shared, and only grants access necessary for the current operation, an allow-list approach. SF designs function with existing hardware and do not exhibit noticeable performance penalties in production workloads versus the unmitigated baseline, and outperform state-of-the-art techniques by allowing speculative execution where secrets are invisible. We implement SF in Xen (a Type-I hypervisor) to demonstrate that the design applies well to a commercial hypervisor. Evaluation shows performance comparable to baseline and up to 37% improvement in certain hypervisor paths compared with Xen default mitigations. Further, we demonstrate Secret-Free is a generic kernel isolation infrastructure for a variety of systems, not limited to Type-I hypervisors. We apply the same model in Hyper-V (Type-I), bhyve (Type-II) and FreeBSD (UNIX kernel) to evaluate its applicability and effectiveness. The successful implementations on these systems prove the generality of SF, and reveal the specific adaptations and optimizations required for each type of kernel. Hongyan Xia, István Haller, Bruce Sherwin, David Chisnall |
SP | 5 |