Gururaj Saileshwar
Research Areas - Computer Architecture and Security.
Assistant Professor in Computer Science, University of Toronto
I am looking for motivated and ambitious PhD students to join my group at the University of Toronto. If you find security for hardware and systems exciting, please reach out to me and apply to the UofT Computer Science program.
My research focuses on improving the security for computing hardware and systems. My research interests include cache side-channels, transient execution attacks, Rowhammer attacks, DRAM integrity, memory safety and fuzzing. Some of my research contributions include:
- Cache Side-Channels: Enabled the fastest known cache timing attacks [1], randomized cache defenses [2] that end an arms race, and one of the first academic hardware defenses against Spectre [3].
- DRAM Security: Enabled practical mitigations for DRAM Rowhammer attacks [4, 5] and designed secure memories [6, 7] for protection against physical attacks.
- Software Reliability: Enabled hardware support for low-cost memory safety [8] and fuzzing [9] to make software resilient to bugs causing a majority of current vulnerabilities.
My work has been awarded a HPCA Best Paper Award, IEEE HOST Best PhD Dissertation Award, ACM SIGARCH / IEEE TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention), ACM SIGMICRO Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention), and a IEEE MICRO Top Picks (Honorable Mention). My PhD was partly supported by a GT Cybersecurity Fellowship and a GT Bourne Fellowship.
I received my PhD at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, where I was advised by Prof. Moinuddin Qureshi. I received my B.Tech and M.Tech at Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay, India. Prior to joining UofT, I was with NVIDIA Research.
teaching
- Fall 2023: CSC2231 - Topics in Computer Systems: Secure Computer Systems and Hardware (course outline)
news (full list)
Jun, 2024 | Our work, PrIDE, the first secure and low cost in-DRAM mitigation against Rowhammer attacks is presented at ISCA'24. |
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Aug, 2023 | Serving as a Workshop & Tutorial Chair at MICRO 2023! |
Jun, 2023 | Awarded the ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) at ISCA'23! |
Feb, 2023 | Our paper Scalable and Secure Row-Swap at HPCA-2023 received the Best Paper Award! |
Aug, 2022 | SQUIP attack (CVE-2021-46778), discovered with collaborators at TU Graz, is public. (techradar, toms hardware, hacker news, ...) |
recent publications (full list)
- HPCAQPRAC: Towards Secure and Practical PRAC-based Rowhammer Mitigation using Priority QueuesIn 31st IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) 2025