INESC-ID celebrates Técnico’s 111th birthday with an afternoon of technology outreach
Today — 23 May 2022 — Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) celebrates its 111th birthday while hosting Dia do Técnico, its annual Open Day. INESC-ID took part in Dia do Técnico by hosting games and activities on conservation biology, augmented reality and telecommunications with the collaboration…
INESC-ID researchers honoured with Universidade de Lisboa / Caixa Geral de Depósitos Scientific Awards
Three INESC-ID researchers have been honoured at this year’s Universidade de Lisboa / Caixa Geral de Depósitos Scientific Awards (Prémios Científicos Universidade de Lisboa / Caixa Geral de Depósitos). The awardees lists recognised Professor Leonel Augusto Pires Seabra de Sousa (Full Professor at the Department…
INESC-ID represented at Encontro Ciência ’22
INESC-ID researchers and their work were showcased at Encontro Ciência ’22, which took place at Centro de Congressos de Lisboa this week. On 16 May Professor Inês Lynce, INESC-ID researcher and Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, as well as co-director of the CMU Portugal…
NII International Internship Program (Tokyo) – Applications open until 20 May 2022
The International Internship Program at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, is back following limitations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NII International Internship Program is an exchange activity with students from institutions with which NII has concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreement,…
INESC-ID present at SciComPT 2022
Across three days, 11-13 May, INESC-ID was present at SciComPT 2022, the Portuguese science communication congress, held this year in São Miguel island, in the Azores. The yearly SciComPT meetings are a great chance for science communication professionals to share best practices and projects across…
Geometry Friends — join the competition!
Geometry Friends is a 2-player cooperative puzzle-platformer game, developed within the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society (AIPS) Research Area at INESC-ID, where two players control two characters — a circle and a rectangle — with distinct characteristics, that try to collect some diamonds in…
World Password Day: see how you can improve yours
Today, 05 May, we celebrate World Password Day. As Security and Privacy is one of the main research foci at INESC-ID, and one of the institute’s major Thematic Lines, we wanted to give our contribution to improving the strength and performance of everyone’s passwords. Miguel…
The 12th Lisbon Machine Learning School – LxMLS 2022
All those interested in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing are invited to attend the 12th Lisbon Machine Learning School – LxMLS 2022, 24-29 July 2022, in-person at Instituto Superior Técnico. LxMLS 2022 will cover a range of machine learning topics important in solving natural…
INESC-ID welcomes ETH Zürich Olissipo researchers
This past week, April 26-29, the INESC-ID Olissipo team received some of the members of the ETH Zürich team, including Professor Niko Beerenwinkel (in addition to members from the Inria team Professors Marie-France Sagot and Ariel Silber). This Staff Exchange included scientific presentations by both…
INESC-ID celebrates the International Girls in ICT Day 2022 with hundreds of students
Today, 28 April 2022, INESC-ID is celebrating the International Girls in ICT Day 2022 by engaging hundreds of students with fun activities on Artificial Intelligence. Set at Pavilhão Casal Vistoso in Areeiro, Lisbon, 9th to 12h grade students from across the country were mobilized in…
Upcoming Events
3rd INESC-ID Security & Privacy Talk by Sandro Pinto (Centro Algoritmi, UMinho)
On May 23, Sandro Pinto will present the 3rd INESC-ID Security & Privacy Talk titled: “You were BUSted!!! Microarchitectural Timing Side-Channel Attacks on Arm Microcontrollers are Practical”.
Date: May 23, 2024
Time: 15h00-16h00
Where: INESC-ID, Alves Redol Building, Auditorium (Room 9), Ground Floor
Abstract:
The discovery of Spectre and Meltdown has turned systems security upside down. These attacks have opened a novel frontier for exploration to hackers and shed light on the untapped potential of hidden transient states created by shared microarchitectural resources. Since then, we have witnessed the rise of a plethora of effective software-based microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks capable of breaking and bypassing the security (isolation) boundaries of numberless processors from mainstream CPU vendors (Intel, AMD, Arm). Notwithstanding, one class of computing systems apparently is resilient to these attacks: microcontrollers (MCUs). MCUs are shipped in billions annually and are at the heart of every embedded and IoT device. There is a common belief that MCUs are not vulnerable to these attacks because their microarchitecture is intrinsically simple.
In this talk, we present BUSted. BUSted is a novel side-channel attack that explores the side effects of the MCU bus interconnect arbitration logic to bypass security guarantees enforced by memory protection primitives. First, we provide evidence of the existence of this channel on multiple platforms. Then, we explain the building blocks, the overall methodology, and the main challenges we faced in successfully mounting the attack. To close our talk, we discuss and demonstrate how to bypass the isolation guarantees of TrustZone-M on a state-of-the-art MCU. We present this attack emulating a secure smart lock IoT application.
Bio:
Sandro Pinto is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Minho, Portugal. He holds a Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Engineering. Sandro has a deep academic background and several years of industry collaboration focusing on operating systems, virtualization, and security for embedded and IoT systems. He has published 100+ scientific papers in top-tier conferences/journals (e.g., IEEE S&P Oakland, USENIX Security, Euro S&P) and is a skilled presenter with speaking experience in several high-profile conferences (e.g., Black Hat, HArdwear.io, RISC-V Summit). Sandro is a long-term supporter of open source. He co-founded the open-source Bao Project and is actively pushing for RISC-V.
INESC-ID Distinguished Lecture: “(Programming Languages) in Agda = Programming (Languages in Agda)” by Professor Philip Wadler (UEdin)
On June 4, Professor Philip Wadler will give an INESC-ID Distinguished Lecture organized in the scope of the BIG ERA Chair Project, titled “(Programming Languages) in Agda = Programming (Languages in Agda)”.
Registration: here (free but mandatory)
Date: June 4, 2024
Time: 15h00-16h15
Where: Anfiteatro Abreu Faro – Complexo Interdisciplinar, Instituto Superior Técnico (Alameda)
Abstract: The most profound connection between logic and computation is a pun. The doctrine of Propositions as Types asserts that propositions correspond to types, proofs to programs, and simplification of proofs to evaluation of programs. Proof by induction is just programming by recursion. Finding a proof becomes as fun as hacking a program. Dependently-typed programming languages, such as Agda, exploit this pun. This talk introduces *Programming Language Foundations in Agda*, a textbook that doubles as an executable Agda script—and also explains the role Agda plays in IOG’s Cardano cryptocurrency.
Short Bio: Philip Wadler is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and a Senior Research Fellow at IOHK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an ACM Fellow. He is head of the steering committee for Proceedings of the ACM, past editor-in-chief of PACMPL and JFP, past chair of ACM SIGPLAN, past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship, winner of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, and a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of over 70 with more than 25,000 citations to his work, according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004), Generics and Collections in Java (O’Reilly, 2006), and Programming Language Foundations in Agda (2018). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.
Philip Wadler likes to introduce theory into practice, and practice into theory. An example of theory into practice: GJ, the basis for Java with generics, derives from quantifiers in second-order logic. An example of practice into theory: Featherweight Java specifies the core of Java in less than one page of rules. He is a principal designer of the Haskell programming language, contributing to its two main innovations, type classes and monads. The YouTube video of his Strange Loop talk Propositions as Types has over 100,000 views. Wadler is also area leader for programming languages at IOHK (now Input Output Global), the blockchain engineering company developing Cardano. He has contributed to work on Plutus, a Turing-complete smart contract language for Cardano written in Haskell; the UTXO ledger system, native tokens, and System F in Agda.
Educational Workshop on Responsible AI for Peace and Security (UNODA)
On June 6 and 7, The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are offering a selected group of technical students the opportunity to join a 2-day educational workshop on Responsible AI for peace and security.
The third workshop in the series will be held in Porto Salvo, Portugal, in collaboration with GAIPS, INESC-ID, and Instituto Superior Técnico. The workshop is open to students affiliated with universities in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa, Oceania, and Asia.
Date & Time: June 6 a 7
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo
Registration deadline: April 8
Summary: “As with the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s day-to-day lives, the impacts for international peace and security include wide-ranging and significant opportunities and challenges. AI can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but its dual-use nature means that peaceful applications can also be misused for harmful purposes such as political disinformation, cyberattacks, terrorism, or military operations. Meanwhile, those researching and developing AI in the civilian sector remain too often unaware of the risks that the misuse of civilian AI technology may pose to international peace and security and unsure about the role they can play in addressing them. Against this background, UNODA and SIPRI launched, in 2023, a three-year educational initiative on Promoting Responsible Innovation in AI for Peace and Security. The initiative, which is supported by the Council of the European Union, aims to support greater engagement of the civilian AI community in mitigating the unintended consequences of civilian AI research and innovation for peace and security. As part of that initiative, SIPRI and UNODA are organising a series of capacity building workshops for STEM students (at PhD and Master levels). These workshops aim to provide the opportunity for up-and-coming AI practitioners to work together and with experts to learn about a) how peaceful AI research and innovation may generate risks for international peace and security; b) how they could help prevent or mitigate those risks through responsible research and innovation; c) how they could support the promotion of responsible AI for peace and security.”