As part as its 50th anniversary celebrations, IRISA will be welcoming computer research experts throughout 2025 as part of its “guests of the month” series.
On November 4, Prof. Yuval Yarom (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany) will present a talk.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
14:30 ⭢ 16:00
Inria Conference center
This talk is open to a non-specialist audience
Microarchitectural Weird Machines
Over the last decades computers have become incredibly complex. Modern computers are an intricate combination of undreds of microarchitectural components, such as caches, execution engines, and various predictors. These all are orchestrated to achieve the ever increasing performance we expect as the field advances. Like in many complex systems, the complexity of microarchitectural components of modern computers and their interaction gives rise to emergent behavior that was not anticipated from the design. This emergent behavior is the topic of this talk.
We focus at first on cache state, demonstrating that it is complex enough to allow arbitrary computation. The main mechanism we use is weird gates, which are software constructs whose execution performs logical functions on cache state. We then discuss some uses of such weird gate, and conclude with discussing how more advanced constructions can be realized.
More about Yuval Yarom:
This talk is part of IRISA's 50th anniversary celebrations.
More details about the program on the dedicated page of our website.
