Haunted Silicon: Hardware Bugs, AI Exorcisms, and Remediation

Distinguished Lecture

Abstract: Silicon is the foundation of modern computing systems: its compromise endangers all higher system layers and, potentially, critical infrastructures. Past years have demonstrated the heavy impact of hardware vulnerabilities exploited through microarchitectural and cross-layer attacks that undermine the security assumptions of entire software stacks. Even seasoned software developers may find this talk relevant when they suspect that bugs might not always originate in their own code.

Conventional assumptions that hardware security can be treated as a one-time verification problem no longer hold. Increasing design complexity, hard-to-detect vulnerabilities, and emerging AI-driven hardware development all demand a lifecycle approach to security assurance.

This talk explores new directions for future hardware security across the hardware lifecycle. Revisiting pre-silicon vulnerability detection, we show how novel AI-guided hardware fuzzing can be significantly more effective in exposing subtle vulnerabilities that remain beyond the reach of conventional methods. We then briefly consider adaptive post-silicon security architectures for mitigating previously unknown attacks.

Expanding on these directions, we discuss open research challenges, including AI-driven code generation that creates new classes of software and hardware security risks.

Bio: Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the System Security Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He led the university’s Cybersecurity Center from 2020 to 2023 and has directed multiple Intel Collaborative Research Labs since 2012. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany, as well as degrees in Industrial and Electrical Engineering. Before joining academia, he worked in R&D at leading IT companies, including Ericsson Telecommunications. His research spans security, privacy, and system design, with lasting impact across academia and industry.

Prof. Sadeghi served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine and on the editorial boards of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the ACM Europe Council.

His achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the German Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for advancing Trusted Computing, ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award (2018), Intel Academic Leadership Award (2021), European Research Council Advanced Grant (2022), DAC (Design Automation Conference) Service Award (2024), and Synopsys Academic Award (2025).