Welcome to our Worskshop on the Security of Software / Hardware Interfaces, which will take place in Rennes (France), November 20-21, 2019 during the European Cyber Week. This Workshop is organized as part of the SILM thematic semester funded by the French DGA and managed by Inria for the different partners.

It is becoming increasingly important to combine software and hardware aspects in order to take into account new software attacks. For example, hardware vulnerabilities such as Spectrum or Meltdown can be exploited by purely software attacks. Such attacks can be executed remotely and do not require physical access to the targeted hardware platform. It is therefore necessary to study in depth the security of software/hardware interfaces, both in terms of attacks and defences.

Virtualization is based on hardware features (Intel VTX, IOMMU, SGX enclave, etc.) that are used by software components, including hypervisors, to improve the performance and security of virtualized systems. These extensions are part of the software/hardware interface and as such deserve to be studied from a security perspective. In addition, hardware vulnerabilities, including micro-architecture, can severely impact the security of virtualized systems. For example, they can lead to questioning the isolation between different virtual machines hosted on the same physical system or between an enclave and the host system.

The workshop on the Security of Hardware Software Interfaces (SILM) will provide an opportunity to bring together various international experts related to this theme.

The first session (Wednesday morning, November 20th) of this workshop will be common to the C&ESAR conference and will focus more specifically on the security of virtualization interfaces.

The second and third sessions (Wednesday afternoon, November 20th and Thursday morning, November 21st) will address issues related to the security of software/hardware interfaces more broadly.

Attending this workshop is free of charge but registration is mandatory.