UMD Researchers Win Top Honor for Advancing Hardware Security

The Institute for Systems Research (ISR) congratulates Professor Gang Qu, ISR and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his co-authors for receiving the Best Paper Award at the 2024 Asian Hardware Oriented Security and Trust Symposium (AsianHOST). Their research, “AutoGuard: A Secure Implementation of the Conditional Branch Instruction,” introduces an innovative approach to improving hardware security.

AsianHOST, an annual conference focused on advancing hardware-based security, was held December 16–18 in Kobe, Japan, bringing together leading researchers and industry experts.

Dr. Qu collaborated with Professor Pengfei Qiu of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), a former visiting student at ECE/ISR, and Professor Dongxing Wang of Tsinghua University. The award winning paper proposed a secure conditional branching architecture, called AutoGuard, to defend against side-channel attacks at computer microarchitecture level. AutoGuard is successfully deployed on multiple processors and Linux kernels and outperforms the state-of-the-art side-channel attack mitigation methods.

For more details, the full paper is available on IEEE Xplore: Read more.

The ISR community celebrates this achievement, recognizing Dr. Qu and his team’s contributions to cybersecurity and hardware protection.

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