Research

SACA has moved to Oxford under the name of OSCAR. Check out www.oscar-ox.com

Our research group focuses on the future of secure architectures and memory systems. This includes topics such as non-volatile memory, distributed memory, and IoT devices.

Secure Architectures

Computer architects design the processors that power today’s data driven world. As computers leverage this data, the memory systems become increasingly vital to the security and operation of systems.

Disaggregated memory systems, or systems with memory distributed over a network, are used to store information while working with data in High Performance Compute (HPC) clusters. How can you have a safe network over which data is shared, while minimizing overhead?

Our thrust into secure architectures focuses on the security of memory systems in computers such as encryption, obfuscation, and efficient data integrity verification schemes.

Non-Volatile Memory

Non-Volatile Memory technologies (such as 3D XPoint) are gaining traction in the world of computer architecture today. It has the advantage of lower power consumption, and greater capacity than traditional DRAM based memory technologies.

In this field we explore the management of such devices, and optimizations that can be made to filesystems and operating systems for performance gains.

Internet of Things

Every day the world is getting more connected, with a plethora of devices being connected to networks. These can improve life, but how can we make sure these devices are safe from malicious actors, without hurting performance?